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AMERICAN PORTRAITS 
1875-1900 



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SAMUEL L. CLEMENS 



AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

1875-1900 

BY 

GAMALIEL BRADFORD 

Author of " Union Portraits," " Confederate Portraits n 
** Portraits of Women," etc. 

With Illustrations 




BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 

ftfje fttber*fte $res« Cambridge 
1922 



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COPYRIGHT, 1920, 1921, AND 1922, BY THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY COMPANY 

COPYRIGHT, 1920 AND 1921, BY THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW CORPORATION 

COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY GAMALIEL BRADFORD 

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 



3.« 



CAMBRIDGE • MASSACHUSETTS 
PRINTED IN THE U.S.A. 



©CLA654836 









TO 
GARLAND GREEVER 



BERNADILLE 
C 'est ce que I 'on appelle le cozur humain. 

MARGOT 
Le cceur humain ? 

BERNADILLE 
£a ne devrait pas etre comme qa> et c'est comme ga. 

COQUEBERT 
Le philosophe s'en etonne. 

BERNADILLE 
Le moraliste s'en afllige — il s'en afflige, le moralistel mais 
c'est tout de meme comme qa. 

MEILHAC AND HAL&VY 



PREFACE 

This group of portraits is the first of a series in which I 
hope to cover American history, proceeding backwards 
with four volumes on the nineteenth century, two on 
the eighteenth, and one on the seventeenth. My inten- 
tion is to include representative figures in all the varied 
lines of life, statesmen and men of action, writers, 
artists, preachers, scholars, professional men, and men 
prominent in the business world. Among the numerous 
difficulties of such an undertaking, not the least is that 
of entering into the special achievements of all these 
distinguished persons. To judge what they accom- 
plished, it would be necessary to be expert in their 
different pursuits. But I am concerned with their souls 
and deal with their work only as their souls are illus- 
trated in it. 

I am aware that in the present volume I have not 
carried out my aim so fully as I could wish. There are 
too many writers and artists. Blaine and Cleveland go 
far to restore the balance with practical life. And 
among the literary and artistic figures there is an 
ample variety and richness of contrast. But I should 
like to have included a man of pure science, and 
especially one of the men of large business capacity who 
are so typically American. What has balked me has 
been the difficulty of obtaining satisfactory material. 
With literary men such material is always abundant. 
Politicians have plenty of friends — or enemies — to 
record their experiences, if they do not do it themselves. 



PREFACE 

But the man of science is apt to be expressed wholly in 
his scientific investigation, and the man of business 
lives his work and does not write it. I hope, however, 
to return at a later period to the closing years of the 
nineteenth century and develop some of the striking 
figures who have teased my curiosity without satisfy- 
ing it. 

There are two drawbacks to any successful portrayal 
of one's contemporaries. The first is that it is pecu- 
liarly difficult to clear one's impression of prejudice. 
One can survey great persons of a hundred years ago 
with a fair amount of detachment from partisan views 
and personal sympathies. But men we have known, or 
whose friends we have known, come before us with a 
cloud of secondary associations which tend to confuse 
the fundamental spiritual issues. We are inclined to 
please somebody, or to spare somebody, or to annoy 
somebody* Even the coolest and most impartial find it 
hard to escape such influences. Sainte-Beuve himself, 
so broad and moderate in dealing with the seventeenth 
and eighteenth centuries, is obviously unjust and un- 
reasonable with many of the great writers of his own 
day. 

Again, the study of contemporaries is complicated 
by the constant appearance of new material. One 
examines every existing document with the utmost 
care and, alas, makes up one's mind. Then new records, 
new letters, new analyses, are published, and one has 
to unmake it, or reconsider the making, and one is 
never sure that one is doing it fairly. To take a striking 
instance. My portrait of Mark Twain was completed 



PREFACE 

before I read Mr. Van Wyck Brooks's "Ordeal of 
Mark Twain." I endeavored to master Mr. Brooks's 
point of view. It seemed to me that I did so, and that, 
while I recognized its brilliancy and ingenuity, it did 
not essentially affect my own original conception. But 
I shall never be sure that, if I had read Mr. Brooks 
first, my portrait would not have been different — and 
better. 

Another experience of this nature has occurred with 
Henry Adams. My study, founded on the "Educa- 
tion" and the various works published by Adams 
himself, was completed before the appearance of the 
"Letters to a Niece" and the "Cycle of Adams Let- 
ters." The introduction to the former book suggested 
some important modifications. But in this case it was 
most interesting to find the main lines of the portrait 
confirmed in the striking series of letters exchanged 
between the Adamses, father and sons. What more is 
needed to show the identity of the Henry Adams of 
the Civil War and the Henry Adams of the "Educa- 
tion" than this passage, addressed to him by his elder 
brother in 1862: "You set up for a philosopher. You 
write letters a la Horace Walpole; you talk of loafing 
round Europe; you pretend to have seen life. Such 
twaddle makes me feel like a giant Warrington talking 
to an infant Pendennis. You 'tired of this life'! You 
more and more 'callous and indifferent about your own 
fortunes'! . . . Fortune has done nothing but favor 
you and yet you are 'tired of this life.' You are beaten 
back everywhere before you are twenty-four, and 
finally writing philosophical letters you grumble at the 

xi 



PREFACE 

strange madness of the times and haven't faith in God 
and the spirit of your age. What do you mean by 
thinking, much less writing such stuff?" (Cycle, vol i, 
p. 102.) To which, for completeness, we may add these 
words of Henry himself: "A man whose mind is bal- 
anced like mine, in such a way that what is evil never 
seems unmixed with good, and what is good always 
streaked with evil; an object seems never important 
enough to call out strong energies till they are ex- 
hausted, nor necessary enough not to allow of its 
failure being possible." (Cycle, vol. i, p. 195.) 

To the complications which peculiarly affect work 
on contemporaries must be joined an increasing sense 
of the difficulty of accomplishing the portrayal of souls 
at all. More than ever I feel that such portrayal, at 
least as I can perform it, has no final value. Souls 
tremble and shift and fade under the touch. They 
elude and evade and mock you, fool you with false 
lights and perplex you with impenetrable shadows, till 
you are almost ready to give up in despair any effort to 
interpret them. But you cannot give it up; for there is 
no artistic effort more fascinating and no study so 
completely inexhaustible. 

If the substance on which we have to found spiritual 
interpretation could be relied on, we might have more 
confidence in the superstructure. But the further we 
go, the more our confidence is shaken. Take one special 
form of material, the report of words and conversations. 
All historians and biographers use such report, are 
tempted to use it much more than they do. Yet how 
abominably uncertain it is and must be. Who of us 

xii 



PREFACE 

can remember for an hour the exact words he himself 
used, even important words, significant words? Much 
more, who can remember such words of any one else? 
Yet diarists and biographers will go home and set down 
at the end of a long evening, or perhaps a day or two 
later, elaborate phrases which the alleged speaker may 
have used, and much more likely may not. And this, 
when the turn of a sentence may alter the light on a 
man's soul! Of such materials is biography made. I 
should not wish any one to have more confidence in 
mine, at least, than I have myself. 

I desire to acknowledge generally the courtesy and 
helpfulness of many correspondents who have offered 
useful suggestions and corrected errors. And for the 
opportunity of profiting by these, I must chiefly thank 
the editor of the Atlantic Monthly whose steady and 
cordial support and sympathy enable me to prosecute 
my work with an enthusiasm which I could hardly 
draw from any other source. 

Gamaliel Bradford 
Wellesley Hills, Massachusetts 
January, 1922 



CONTENTS 




I. Mark Twain 


1 


II. Henry Adams 


29 


III. Sidney Lanier 


59 


IV. James McNeill Whistler 


85 


V. James Gillespie Blaine 


113 


VI. Grover Cleveland 


143 


VII. Henry James— " 


171 


VIII. Joseph Jefferson 


197 


Notes 


225 


Index 


243 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

Samuel Langhorne Clemens Frontispiece 

Henry Adams ' 30 

From a drawing by James Brooks Potter 

Sidney Lanier 60 

James McNeill Whistler 86 

James G. Blaine 114 

Grover Cleveland 144 

Photograph by Pach Brothers, New York 

Henry James 172 

From a painting by J. S. Sargent, R.A. Photograph 
by Emery Walker, Limited, made by permission of 
the Director of the National Portrait Gallery 

Joseph Jefferson 198 

Photograph by Sarony, New York 



AMERICAN PORTRAITS 
1875-1900 

I 

MARK TWAIN 



CHRONOLOGY 

Samuel Langhorne Clemens. 

Born, Florida, Missouri, November 30, 1835. 

Pilot on the Mississippi, 1857-1861. 

In the West, 1861-1866. 

Innocents Abroad published, 1869. 

Married Olivia Langdon, February 2, 1870. 

Roughrng It published, 1872. 

Adventures of Tom Sawyer published, 1876. 

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn published, 1884. 

Failure of Webster & Company, 1894. 

Wife died, June 5, 1904. 

Degree of Doctor of Letters from Oxford, 1907. 

Died, Redding, Connecticut, April 21, 1910. 



AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

i 

MARK TWAIN 



When I was a boy of fourteen, Mark Twain took hold 
of me as no other book had then and few have since. I 
lay on the rug before the fire in the long winter eve- 
nings and my father read me "The Innocents Abroad" 
and "Roughing It" and "Old Times on the Missis- 
sippi," and I laughed till I cried. Nor was it all 
laughter. The criticism of life, strong and personal, if 
crude, the frank, vivid comments on men and things? 
set me thinking as I had never thought, and for several 
years colored my maturing reflection in a way that 
struck deep and lasted long. 

Such is my youthful memory of Mark. For forty 
years I read little of him. Now, leaping over that 
considerable gulf, reading and re-reading old and new 
together, to distil the essence of his soul in a brief 
portrait, has been for me a wild revel, a riot of laughter 
and criticism and prejudice and anti-prejudice and 
revolt and rapture, from which it seems as if no sane 
and reasoned judgment could ensue. Perhaps none has. 

This much is clear, to start with, that Mark is not to 
be defined or judged by the ordinary standards of mere 
writers or literary men. He was something different, 

3 



AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

perhaps something bigger and deeper and more human, 
at any rate something different. He did a vast amount 
of literary work and did it, if one may say so, in a 
literary manner. He was capable of long, steady toil at 
the desk. He wrote and rewrote, revised his copy over 
and over again with patience and industry. He had the 
writer's sense of living for the public, too, instinctively 
made copy of his deepest personal emotions and ex- 
periences. One of his most striking productions is the 
account of the death of his daughter, Jean; but no one 
but a born writer would have deliberately set down 
such experiences at such a moment with publication in 
his thought. And he liked literary glory. To be sure, 
he sometimes denied this. In youth he wrote, "There 
is no satisfaction in the world's praise anyhow, and it 
has no worth to me save in the way of business." l 
Again, he says in age, "Indifferent to nearly every- 
thing but work. I like that; I enjoy it, and stick to it. 
I do it without purpose and without ambition; merely 
for the love of it." 2 All the same, fame was sweet to 
him. 

Yet one cannot think of him as a professional writer. 
Rather, there is something of the bard about him, of 
the old, epic, popular singer, who gathered up in him- 
self, almost unconsciously, the life and spirit of a whole 
nation and poured it forth, more as a voice, an instru- 
ment, than as a deliberate artist. Consider the mass of 
folk-lore in his best, his native books. Is it not just such 
material as we find in the spontaneous, elementary 
productions of an earlier age? 

Better still, perhaps, we should speak of him as a 

4 



MARK TWAIN 

journalist; for a journalist he was essentially and 
always, in his themes, in his gorgeous and unfailing 
rhetoric, even in his attitude toward life. The journal- 
ist, when inspired and touched with genius, is the 
nearest equivalent of the old epic singer, most embodies 
the ideal of pouring out the life of his day and sur- 
roundings with as little intrusion as possible of his own 
personal, reflective consciousness. 

And as Mark had the temperament to do this, so he 
had the training. No man ever sprang more thoroughly 
from the people or was better qualified to interpret the 
people. Consider the nomadic irrelevance of his early 
days, before his position was established, if it was ever 
established. Born in the Middle West toward the 
middle of the century, he came into a moving world, 
and he never ceased to be a moving spirit and to move 
everybody about him. He tried printing as a business, 
but any indoor business was too tame, even though 
diversified by his thousand comic inventions. Piloting 
on the vast meanders of the Mississippi was better. 
What contacts he had there, with good and evil, with 
joy and sorrow ! But even the Mississippi was not vast 
enough for his uneasy soul. He roved the Far West, 
tramped, traveled, mined, and speculated, was rich one 
day and miserably poor the next; and all the time he 
cursed and jested alternately and filled others with 
laughter and amazement and affection and passed into 
and out of their lives, like the shifting shadow of a 
dream. Surely the line of the old poet was made for 
him, 

"Now clothed in feathers he on steeples walks." 
5 



AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

And thus it was that he met his friend's challenge to 
walk the city roofs, where they promenaded arm in arm, 
until a policeman threatened to shoot, and was only 
restrained by the explanatory outcry, "Don't shoot! 
That's Mark Twain and Artemus Ward." 3 

This was his outer youthful life, and within it was 
the same. For with some the feet wander while the soul 
sits still. It was not so with him. Though all his life he 
scolded himself for laziness, complained of his indo- 
lence, or gloried in it; yet when he was interested in 
anything, his heart was one mad fury of energy. Listen 
to his theory on the subject: "If I were a heathen, I 
would rear a statue to Energy, and fall down and 
worship it ! I want a man to — I want you to — take 
up a line of action, and follow it out, in spite of the 
very devil." 4 And practice for himself never fell short 
of theory for others. 

To be sure, his energy was too often at the mercy of 
impulse. Where his fancies led him, there he followed, 
with every ounce of force he had at the moment. What 
might come afterwards he did not stop to think about 
— until afterwards. Then there were sometimes bitter 
regrets, which did not prevent a repetition of the proc- 
ess. He touches off the whole matter with his unfail- 
ing humor: "I still do the thing commanded by Cir- 
cumstance and Temperament, and reflect afterward. 
Always violently. When I am reflecting on these 
occasions, even deaf persons can hear me think." 5 

Perhaps the most amusing of all these spiritual 
efforts and adventures of his youth were his dealings 
with money. He was no born lover of money, and he 

6 



MARK TWAIN 

was certainly no miser; but he liked what money 
brings, and from his childhood he hated debt and 
would not tolerate it. Therefore he was early and 
always on the lookout for sources of gain and was often 
shrewd in profiting by them. But what he loved most 
of all was to take a chance. His sage advice on the 
matter is: "There are two times in a man's life when he 
should not speculate : when he can't afford it and when 
he can." 6 Apparently his own life escaped from these 
all-embracing conditions; for he speculated always. A 
gold mine or a patent, an old farm or a new print- 
ing machine — all were alike to him, vast regions of 
splendid and unexplored possibility. And much as he 
reveled in the realities of life, possibility was his natural 
domain, gorgeous dreams and sunlit fancies, strange 
realms of the imagination, where his youthful spirit 
loved to wander and shape cloud futures that could 
never come to pass, as he himself well knew, and knew 
that to their unrealizable remoteness they owed the 
whole of their charm. 

But, you say, this was, after all, youthful. When 
years came upon him, when he had tasted the sedate 
soberness of life, dreams must have grown dim or been 
forgotten. Far from it. His lovely wife called him 
"Youth," till she died, and he deserved it. Though he 
was married and a great author and had a dozen homes, 
he never settled down, neither his feet nor his soul. 
The spirit of his early ideal, "A life of don't-care-a- 
damn in a boarding-house is what I have asked for in 
many a secret prayer," 7 lingered with him always. 
You see, he had restless nerves, to which long quiet and 

7 



AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

solitary, sombre reflection were a horror. And then he 
had perfect, magnificent health, the kind that can 
endure boarding-houses without ruin. "In no other 
human being have I ever seen such physical endur- 
ance," says his biographer. 8 And Mark himself de- 
clared that he never knew what fatigue was. Who that 
was made like this would not be glad to wander forever? 
So Mark was most happy and most at home when he 
was wandering. 

He saw and liked to see all things and all men and 
women. The touch of a human hand was pleasant to 
him, and the sound of a human voice, speaking no 
matter what lingo. He made friends of pilots and 
pirates and miners and peasants and emperors and 
clergymen, particularly clergymen, over whom he 
apparently exercised such witchery that oaths from 
him fell on their ears like prayers from other people. 
No man ever more abused the human heart, or railed 
more at the hollowness of human affection, and no man 
ever had more friends or loved more. To be sure, he 
could hate, with humorous frenzy and apparently with 
persistence. But love in the main prevailed and, indeed, 
what anchored his wandering footsteps was not places 
but souls, was love and tenderness. He had plenty for 
the pilots and the pirates and the clergymen. He had 
much more for those who were nearest him. His 
infinite devotion to his daughters, most of all to his 
wife, who was fully worthy of it and who understood 
and brought out the best in him and tolerated what 
was not so good, is not the least among the things that 
make him lovable. 

8 



MARK TWAIN 

As he was a creature of contradictions, it is no sur- 
prise to find that, while he prayed for boarding-houses, 
he loved comfort and even luxury. He would have eaten 
off a plank in a mining-camp, and slept on one; but the 
softest beds and the richest tables were never unwel- 
come, and one attraction of wandering was to see how 
comfortable men can be as well as how uncomfortable. 
Now, to have luxury, you must have money. And 
Mark, in age as in youth, always wanted money, 
whether from mines in Nevada, or from huge books 
sold by huge subscription, or from strange and surpris- 
ing inventions that were bound to revolutionize the 
worlds and bring in multimillions. He always wanted 
money, though rivers of it ran in to him — and ran out 
again. He spent it, he gave it away, he never had it, he 
always wanted it. 

And always, till death, his soul wandered even more 
than his body did. And his adventures with money 
were mainly matters of dream, even when the dreams 
were punctuated with sharp material bumps. Again 
and again some exciting speculation appealed to him, 
as much for its excitement as for its profit. He built 
great cloud castles and wandered in them and bade his 
friends admire them and made colossal calculations of 
enormous successes. Then the clouds collapsed and 
vanished and the flaw in the calculations became 
apparent — too late. Calculations were never a strong 
point with him, whether of assets or liabilities. He 
spent a white night working over the latter: "When I 
came down in the morning a gray and aged wreck, and 
went over the figures again, I found that in some 

9 



AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

unaccountable way I had multiplied the totals by 2. 
By God, I dropped 75 years on the floor where I 
stood." 9 

Even his loves had an element of dream in them, and 
surely dream made up a large portion of his hatred. 
Certain natures offended him, exasperated him, and he 
amused himself with furious assertion of how he would 
like to torment them. If he had seen one of them suffer, 
even in a finger's end, he would have done all in his 
power to relieve it. But in the abstract how he did 
luxuriate in abuse of these imaginary enemies, what 
splendor of new-coined damnation he lavished on them, 
and all a matter of dreams ! 

Something of dream entered also into his widespread 
glory; for such wealth of praise and admiration has 
surely not often fallen upon walkers of the firm-set 
earth. During the first decade of the twentieth century 
he drifted in his white dream garments — as Emily 
Dickinson did in solitude — through dream crowds 
who applauded him and looked up to him and loved 
him. And he ridiculed it, turned it inside out to show 
the full dream lining, and enjoyed it, enjoyed his vast 
successes on the public platform, enjoyed the thronging 
tributes of epistolary admirers, enjoyed the many 
hands that touched his in loving and grateful tender- 
ness. 

And at the end, to make the dream complete, as if it 
were the conception of a poet, a full, rounded, perfect 
tragedy, misfortunes and disasters piled in upon the 
dream glory and thwarted and blighted it, even while 
their depth of gloom seemed to make its splendor more 

10 



MARK TWAIN 

imposing. Money, which had all along seduced him, 
betrayed him, for a time at any rate, and he wallowed 
in the distress of bankruptcy, till he made his own 
shoulders lift the burden. One of his daughters, who 
was very dear to him, died when he was far away from 
her. His wife died and took happiness with her and 
made all glory seem like sordid folly. His youngest 
daughter died suddenly, tragically. What was there 
left? 

Nothing. Toys, trifles, snatched moments of obliv- 
ion, billiards, billiards, till midnight, then a little 
troubled sleep, and more billiards till the end. In 
perhaps the most beautiful words he ever wrote he 
summed up the fading quality of it all under this very 
figure of a dream: "Old Age, white-headed, the temple 
empty, the idols broken, the worshipers in their graves, 
nothing but You, a remnant, a tradition, belated fag- 
end of a foolish dream, a dream that was so ingeniously 
dreamed that it seemed real all the time; nothing left 
but You, centre of a snowy desolation, perched on the 
ice-summit, gazing out over the stages of that long trek 
and asking Yourself, * Would you do it again if you had 
the chance?'" 10 

II 

Mark Twain is generally known to the world as a 
laugher. His seriousness, his pathos, his romance, his 
instinct for adventure, are all acknowledged and en- 
joyed. Still, the mention of his name almost always 
brings a smile first. So did the sight of him. 
There is no doubt that he found the universe laugh- 

11 



AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

able and made it so. The ultimate test of the laughing 
instinct is that a man should be always ready to laugh 
at himself. Mark was. The strange chances of his life, 
its ups and downs, its pitiful disasters, sometimes 
made him weep, often made him swear. But at a touch 
they could always make him laugh. "There were few 
things that did not amuse him," writes his biographer, 
"and certainly nothing amused more, or oftener, 
than himself." u One brief sentence sums up what he 
was never tired of repeating, " I have been an author 
for 20 years and an ass for 55." 12 And he not only saw 
laughter when it came to him. He went to seek it. He 
was always fond of jests and fantastic tricks, made 
mirth out of solemn things and solemn people, stood 
ready, like the clown of the circus, to crack his whip 
and bid the world dance after him in quaint freaks of 
jollity, all the more diverting when staid souls and 
mirthless visages played a chief part in the furious 
revel. 

On the strength of this constant sense and love of 
laughter many have maintained that Mark was one of 
the great world humorists, that he ranks with Cer- 
vantes and Sterne and the Shakespeare of "As You 
Like It" and "Twelfth Night," as one who was an 
essential exponent of the comic spirit. With this view 
I cannot wholly agree. It is true that Mark could find 
the laughable element in everything, true also that he 
had that keen sense of melancholy which is inseparable 
from the richest comedy. Few have expressed this 
more intensely than he has: "Everything human is 
pathetic. The secret source of humor itself is not joy, 

12 



MARK TWAIN 

but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven." 1S Yet the 
very extravagance of expression here suggests my 
difficulty. Somehow in Mark the humor and the pathos 
are not essentially blended. The laughter is wild and 
exuberant as heart can desire. But it does not really go 
to the bottom of things. Serious matters, so-called 
serious matters, are taken too seriously; and under the 
laughter there is a haunting basis of wrath and bitter- 
ness and despair. 

To elucidate this it is necessary to examine and 
follow the process and progress of Mark's thinking. In 
early years, as he himself admits, he thought little, 
that is, abstractly. His mind was active enough, busy 
enough, and, as we have seen, his fancy was always 
full of dreams. But he let the great problems alone, did 
not analyze, did not philosophize, content to extract 
immense joviality from the careless surface of life and 
not probe further. Even the analysis of laughter itself 
did not tempt him. In this he was probably wise and he 
maintained the attitude always. "Humor is a subject 
which has never had much interest for me." 14 Indeed, 
the analysis of humor may be safely left to those gray 
persons who do not know what it is. But much of the 
jesting of Mark's youthful days is so trivial that it 
distinctly implies the absence of steady thinking on 
any subject. Not that he was indifferent to practical 
seriousness. Wrong, injustice, cruelty, could always 
set him on fire in a moment. There was no folly about 
his treatment of these. But at that stage his serious- 
ness was busy with effects rather than with causes. 

Then he acquired money and leisure and began to 

13 



AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

reflect upon the nature of things. This late dawning of 
his speculative turn must always be remembered in 
considering the quality of it. It accounts for the singu- 
lar gaps in his information about simple matters, for 
the impression of terrific but not very w T ell-guided 
energy which comes from his intellectual effort. It 
accounts for the sense of surprise and novelty in his 
spiritual attitude, which Howells so justly pointed 
out. 15 He seems always like a man discovering things 
which are perfectly well known to trained thinkers, and 
this gives an extraordinary freshness and spirit to his 
pronouncements on all speculative topics. 

When he became aware of his reasoning powers, he 
delighted in them. His shrewd little daughter said of 
him, "He is as much of a philosopher as anything, I 
think." 16 He was a philosopher by inclination, at any 
rate. He loved to worry the universe, as a kitten 
worries a ball of yarn. Perhaps this seemed to make up 
in a small way for the worries the universe had given 
him. He loved to argue and discuss and dispute and 
confute, and then to spread over all bitterness the 
charm of his inextinguishable laughter. His oaths and 
jests and epigrams convulsed his interlocutors, if they 
did not convince them. 

As to his theoretical conclusions, it may be said that 
they were in the main nihilistic. But before considering 
them more particularly, it must be insisted and em- 
phasized that they were theoretical and did not affect 
his practical morals. Few human beings ever lived who 
had a nicer conscience and a finer and more delicate 
fulfilment of duty. It is true that all his life he kept up 

14 



MARK TWAIN 

a constant humorous depreciation of himself in this 
regard. If you listened to his own confessions, you 
would think him the greatest liar in existence and 
conclude that his moral depravation was only equaled 
by his intellectual nullity. This method is often effec- 
tive for hiding and excusing small defects and delin- 
quencies. But Mark needed no such excuse. What 
failings there were in his moral character were those 
incident to humanity. As an individual he stood with 
the best. 

The most obvious instances of his rectitude are in 
regard to money. In spite of his dreams and specu- 
lative vagaries, he was punctiliously scrupulous in 
financial relations, his strictness culminating in the vast 
effort of patience and self-denial necessary to pay off 
the debt of honor which fell upon him in his later years. 
But the niceness of his conscience was not limited to 
broad obligations of this kind. "Mine was a trained 
Presbyterian conscience," he says, "and knew but the 
one duty — to hunt and harry its slave upon all pre- 
texts and all occasions." 17 He might trifle, he might 
quibble, he might jest; but no one was more anxious to 
do what was fair and right, even to the point of over- 
doing it. "I don't wish even to seem to do anything 
which can invite suspicion," he said, as to a matter so 
trivial as taking advantage in a game. 18 

And the moral sense was not confined to practical 
matters of conduct. Human tenderness and kindliness 
and sympathy have rarely been more highly developed 
than in this man who questioned their existence. The 
finest touch in all his writings is the cry of Huck Finn 

15 



AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

when, after a passionate struggle between his duty to 
society and his duty to friendship, he tears the paper in 
which he proposed to surrender the nigger, Jim, and 
exclaims, "All right, then, I'll go to hell." 19 And Mark 
himself would have been perfectly capable, not only of 
saying he would go, but of going. 

As he loved men,'so he trusted them. In the abstract, 
judging from himself, he declared they were monsters 
of selfishness, greedy, deceitful, treacherous, thought- 
ful in all things of their own profit and advantage. In 
the individual, again judging from himself, he accepted 
them at their face value, as kindly, self-sacrificing, 
ready to believe, ready to love, ready to help. Being 
himself an extreme example, both in sceptical analysis 
and in human instinct, he often fell into error and 
trusted where there was no foundation to build on. 

In consequence his actual experience went far to 
justify his sceptical theories, and he presents another 
instance, like Byron, like Leopardi, of a man whose 
standard of life is so high, who expects so much of him- 
self and of others, that the reality perpetually fails him, 
and excess of optimism drives him to excess of pessi- 
mism. For example, his interesting idealization or 
idolatry of Joan of Arc, his belief that she actually 
existed as a miracle of nature, makes it comprehensible 
that he should find ordinary men and women faulty 
and contemptible enough compared with such a type. 

It is not the place here to analyze Mark's speculative 
conclusions in detail. They may be found theoretically 
elaborated in "What is Man?", practically applied in 
"The Mysterious Stranger" and the "Maxims of 

16 



MARK TWAIN 

Pudd'nhead Wilson," and artistically illustrated in 
"The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg" and innu- 
merable other stories. They may be summed up as a 
soul-less and blasting development of crude evolution- 
ary materialism, as manifested in the teachings of 
Robert Ingersoll. Man's freedom disappears, his 
morality becomes enlightened selfishness, his soul is 
dissipated into thin air, his future life grows so dubious 
as to be disregarded, and the thought of death is only 
tolerable because life is not. The deity, in any sense of 
value to humanity, is quite disposed of; or, if he is left 
lurking in an odd corner of the universe, it is with such 
complete discredit that one can only remember the 
sarcasm of the witty Frenchman: "The highest com- 
pliment we can pay God is not to believe in him." 

In all this perpetually recurrent fierce dissection of 
the divine and human, one is constantly impressed by 
the vigor and independence of the thinking. The man 
makes his own views; or since, as he himself repeatedly 
insists, no one does this, at least he makes them over, 
rethinks them, gives them a cast, a touch that stamps 
them Mark Twain's and no one else's, and, as such, 
significant for the study of his character, if for nothing 
more. 

On the other hand, if the thinking is fresh and vig- 
orous, one is also impressed and distressed by its nar- 
rowness and dogmatism. Here again the man's in- 
dividuality shows in ample, humorous recognition of 
his own weakness, or excess of strength. No one has 
ever admitted with more delightful candor the en- 
croaching passion of a preconceived theory. I have got 

17 



AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

a philosophy of life, he says, and the rest of my days 
will be spent in patching it up and "in looking the other 
way when an imploring argument or a damaging fact 
approaches." 20 Nevertheless, the impression of dog- 
matism remains, or, let us say better, of limitation. 
The thinking is acute, but it does not go to the bottom 
of things. The fundamental, dissolving influence of 
the idealistic philosophy, for instance, is not once 
suggested or comprehended. This shows nowhere more 
fully than in the discussion of Christian Science. Ev- 
erything is shrewd, apt, brilliant, but wholly on the 
surface. 

The effect of the bitter and withering character of 
Mark's thought on his own life was much emphasized 
by the lack of the great and sure spiritual resources 
that are an unfailing refuge to some of us. He could not 
transport himself into the past. When he attempted it, 
he carried all the battles and problems of to-day along 
with him, as in the "Yankee at the Court of King 
Arthur." He had not the historical feeling in its richest 
sense. Art, also, in all its deeper manifestations, was 
hidden from him. He could not acquire a love for 
classical painting or music, and revenged himself for 
his lack of such enjoyment by railing at those who had 
it. Even Nature did not touch great depths in him, 
because they were not there. He reveled in her more 
theatrical aspects, sunsets, ice-storms. Her energy 
stimulated a strange excitement in him, shown in 
Twitchell's account of his rapture over a mountain 
brook. 21 I do not find that he felt the charm of lonely 
walks in country solitude. 

18 



MARK TWAIN 

It is on this lack of depth in thinking and feeling that 
I base my reluctance to class Mark with the greatest 
comic writers of the world. His thought was bitter 
because it was shallow; it did not go deep enough to 
get the humble tolerance, the vast self-distrust that 
should go w T ith a dissolving vision of the foundations of 
the individual universe. His writing alternates from 
the violence of unmeaning laughter to the harshness of 
satire that has no laughter in it. In this he resembles 
Moliere, whose Scapins are as far from reflection as are 
his Tartuffes from gayety. And Mark's place is rather 
with the bitter satirists, Moliere, Ben Jonson, Swift, 
than with the great, broad, sunshiny laughers, Lamb, 
Cervantes, and the golden comedy of Shakespeare. 

Indeed, no one word indicates better the lack I mean 
in Mark than "sunshine." You may praise his work in 
many ways; but could any one ever call it merry? He 
can give you at all times a riotous outburst of convuls- 
ing cachinnation. He cannot give you merriment, 
sunshine, pure and lasting joy. And these are always 
the enduring elements of the highest comedy. 

iu 

But perhaps this is to consider too curiously. The 
vast and varied total of Mark's works affords other 
elements of interest besides the analysis of speculative 
thought, or even of laughter. Above all, we Americans 
should appreciate how thoroughly American he is. To 
be sure, in the huge mixture of stocks and races that 
surrounds us, it seems absurd to pick out anything or 
anybody as typically American. Yet we do it. We all 

19 



AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

choose Franklin as the American of the eighteenth 
century and Lincoln as the American of the nineteenth. 
And most will agree that Mark was as American as 
either of these. 

He was American in appearance. The thin, agile, 
mobile figure, with its undulating ease in superficial 
awkwardness, suggested worlds of humorous sensibility. 
The subtle, wrinkled face, under its rich shock of hair, 
first red, then snowy white, had endless possibilities of 
sympathetic response. It was a face that expressed, 
repressed, impressed every variety of emotion known 
to its owner. 

He was American in all his defects and limitations. 
The large tolerance, cut short with a most definite end 
when it reached the bounds of its comprehension, was 
eminently American. The slight flavor of vanity, at 
least of self-complacent satisfaction, the pleasant and 
open desire to fill a place in the world, whether by 
mounting a platform at just the right moment or 
wearing staring white clothes in public places, we may 
call American with slight emphasis, as well as human. 

But these weaknesses were intimately associated 
with a very American excellence, the supreme candor, 
the laughing frankness which recognized them always. 
Assuredly no human being ever more abounded in such 
candor than Mark Twain. He confessed at all times, 
with the superabundance of diction that was born with 
him, all his enjoyment, all his suffering, all his sin, all 
his hope, all his despair. 

And he was American in another delightful thing, 
his quickness and readiness of sympathy, his singular 

20 



MARK TWAIN 

gentleness and tenderness. He could lash out with his 
tongue and tear anything and anybody to pieces. He 
could not have done bodily harm to a fly, unless a 
larger pity called for it. He was supremely modest and 
simple in his demands upon others, supremely deprecia- 
tive of the many things he did for them. "I wonder 
why they all go to so much trouble for me. I never go 
to any trouble for anybody." 22 The quiet wistfulness 
of it, when you know him, brings tears. 

Above all, he was American in his thorough democ- 
racy. He had a pitiful distrust of man; but his belief in 
men, all men, was as boundless as his love for them. 
Though he lived much with the rich and lofty, he was 
always perfectly at home with the simple and the poor, 
understood their thoughts, liked their ways, and made 
them feel that he had been simple and poor himself and 
might be so again. 

He was not only democratic in feeling and spirit, he 
was democratic in authorship, both in theory and 
practice. Hundreds of authors have been obliged to 
write for the ignorant many, for the excellent reason 
that the cultivated few would not listen to them. Per- 
haps not one of these hundreds has so deliberately 
avowed his purpose of neglecting the few to address 
the many, as Mark did. The long letter to Mr. Andrew 
Lang, in which he proclaims this intention, is a curious 
document. Let others aim high, he says, let others 
exhaust themselves in restless and usually vain at- 
tempts to please fastidious critics. I write for the 
million, I want to please them, I know how to do it, I 
have done it. " I have never tried, in even one single 

21 



AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

instance, to help cultivate the cultivated classes. ... 
I never had any ambition in that direction, but always 
hunted for bigger game — the masses. I have seldom 
deliberately tried to instruct them, but have done my 
best to entertain them. To simply amuse them would 
have satisfied my dearest ambition at any time." 23 

It is hardly necessary to dwell upon the weak points 
in this theory. Whatever Mark, or any one else pro- 
fesses, it cannot be questioned that he would prefer the 
approbation of the cultured few, if he could get it. 
Moreover, it may easily be maintained that the many 
in most cases take their taste from the few; and if this 
does not hold with a writer's contemporaries, it is 
unfailing with posterity. If a writer is to please the 
generations that follow him, he can do it only by secur- 
ing the praise of those who by taste and cultivation are 
qualified to judge. In other words, if Mark's works 
endure, it will be because he appealed to the few as well 
as to the many. 

However this may be, there can he no question that 
Mark reached the great democratic public of his own 
day and held it. To be sure, it is doubtful whether even 
he attained the full glory of what he and Stevenson 
agreed to call submerged authorship, 24 the vast accept- 
ance of those who are w r ept over at lone midnight by 
the shop-girl and the serving-maid. But his best- 
known books, "Tom Sawyer," "Huck Finn," "Life 
on the Mississippi," "The Prince and the Pauper," 
may be justly said to belong to the literature of Ameri- 
can democracy, and the travel books and many others 
are not far behind these. 

22 



MARK TWAIN 

With this deliberate intention to appeal to the masses 
and to affect the masses, it becomes an essential part of 
the study of Mark's career and character to consider 
what his influence upon the masses was. He talked to 
them all his life, from the platform and from the 
printed page, with his sympathetic, human voice, his 
insinuating smile. What did his talk mean to them, 
how did it affect them, for good or for evil? 

In the first place, beyond a doubt, enormously for 
good. Laughter in itself is an immense blessing to 
the weary soul, not a disputable blessing, like too 
much teaching and preaching, but a positive benefit. 
"Amusement is a good preparation for study and a 
good healer of fatigue after it," says Mark himself. 25 
And amusement he provided, in vast abundance, 
muscle-easing, spirit-easing. 

Also, he did more than make men laugh; he made 
them think, on practical, moral questions. He used his 
terrible weapon of satire to demolish meanness, greed, 
pettiness, dishonesty. He may have believed in the 
abstract that selfishness was the root of human action, 
but he scourged it in concrete cases with whips of 
scorpions. He may have believed in the abstract that 
men were unfit to govern themselves, but he threw the 
bitterest scorn on those who attempted to tyrannize 
over others. 

Finally, Mark's admirers insist, and insist with 
justice, that he was a splendid agent in the overthrow 
of shams. He loved truth, sincerity, the simple recog- 
nition of facts as they stand, no matter how homely, 
and with all his soul he detested cant of all kinds. "His 

23 



AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

truth and his honor, his love of truth, and his love of 
honor, overflow all boundaries," says Mr. Birrell, "he 
has made the world better by his presence." 26 From 
this point of view the praise was fully deserved. 

Yet it is just here that we come upon the weakness. 
And if Mark made the world better, he also made it 
worse; at any rate, many individuals in it. For, with 
the wholesale destruction of shams, went, as so often, 
the destruction of reverence, "that angel of the world," 
as Shakespeare calls it. When Mark had fairly got 
through with the shams, the trouble was that there was 
nothing left. One of his enthusiastic admirers compares 
him to Voltaire. The comparison is interesting and 
suggestive. Voltaire, too, was an enormous power in 
his day. He wrote for the multitude, so far as it was 
then possible to do it. He wielded splendid weapons of 
sarcasm and satire. He was always a destroyer of 
shams, smashed superstition and danced upon the 
remains of it. But Voltaire was essentially an optimist 
and believed in and enjoyed many things. He be- 
lieved in literature, he believed in glory, above all he 
believed in himself. When Mark had stripped from 
life all the illusions that remained even to Voltaire, 
there was nothing left but a bare, naked, ugly, hideous 
corpse, amiable only in that it was a corpse, or finally 
would be. 

Mark himself frequently recognizes this charge of 
being a demolisher of reverence and tries to rebut it. I 
never assault real reverence, he says. To pretend to 
revere things because others revere them, or say they 
do, to cherish established superstitions of art, or of 

24 



MARK TWAIN 

morals, or of religion, is to betray and to deceive and to 
corrupt. But I never mock those things that I really 
revere myself. All other reverence is humbug. And 
one is driven to ask, What does he really revere him- 
self ? His instinctive reverence for humanity in individ- 
ual cases is doubtless delicate and exquisite. But in 
theory he tears the veil from God and man alike. 

To illustrate, I need only quote two deliberate and 
well-weighed statements of his riper years. How could 
you wither man more terribly than in the following? 
"A myriad of men are born; they labor and sweat and 
struggle for bread; they squabble and scold and fight; 
they scramble for little mean advantages over each 
other; age creeps upon them; infirmities follow; shames 
and humiliations bring down their prides and their 
vanities; those they love are taken from them and the 
joy of life is turned to aching grief. The burden of 
pain, care, misery, grows heavier year by year; at 
length ambition is dead; pride is dead; vanity is dead; 
longing for release is in their place. It comes at last — 
the only unpoisoned gift earth ever had for them — 
and they vanish from a world where they were of no 
consequence, where they have achieved nothing, where 
they were a mistake and a failure and a foolishness; 
where they have left no sign that they have existed — a 
world which will lament them a day and forget them 
forever." 27 

For those who thus envisaged man there used to be a 
refuge with God. Not so for Mark. Man deserves pity. 
God, at least any God who might have been a refuge, 
deserves nothing but horror and contempt. The criti- 

25 



AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

cism is, to be sure, put into the mouth of Satan; but 
Satan would have been shocked at it : he was not so far 
advanced as Mark: "A God who could make good 
children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad 
ones; who could have made every one of them happy, 
yet never made a single happy one . . . who mouths jus- 
tice and invented hell — mouths mercy and invented 
hell — mouths Golden Rules, and forgiveness multiplied 
by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths 
morals to other people and has none himself; who 
frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created 
man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the re- 
sponsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honor- 
ably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and 
finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this 
poor, abused slave to worship him!" 28 

Can it be considered that doctrines such as this are 
likely to be beneficial to the average ignorant reader of 
democracy, or that the preacher of them made the 
world wholly better by his presence? It is true that 
they do not appear so openly in Mark's best-known 
books, true that the practical manliness and generosity 
of Tom and Huck largely eclipse them. Yet the fierce 
pessimism of Pudd'nhead Wilson stares at the reader 
from the popular story of that name and from the 
equally popular "Following the Equator," and even in 
the history of Tom and Huck the hand that slashes 
reverence is never far away. 

The charge of evil influence fretted Mark as much as 
that of irreverence. He defends himself by denying 
that there is such a thing as personal influence from 

26 



MARK TWAIN 

doctrines. Our happiness and unhappiness, he says, 
come from our temperament, not from our belief, which 
does not affect them in the slightest. This is, of course, 
an exaggeration, as the story of Mark's own life shows. 
I have already pointed out that in his case lack of 
belief did not mean lack of morals; but it does in many 
cases and lack of happiness in many more. One can 
perhaps best speak for one's self. It took years to 
shake off the withering blight which Mark's satire cast 
for me over the whole art of Europe. For years he 
spoiled for me some of the greatest sources of relief and 
joy. How many never shake off that blight at all! 
And again, in going back to him to write this portrait, 
I found the same portentous, shadowing darkness 
stealing over me that he had spread before. I lived for 
ten years with the soul of Robert E. Lee and it really 
made a little better man of me. Six months of Mark 
Twain made me a worse. I even caught his haunting 
exaggeration of profanity. And I am fifty-six years old 
and not over-susceptible to infection. What can he not 
do to children of sixteen? 

It is precisely his irresistible personal charm that 
makes his influence overwhelming. You hate Voltaire, 
you love Mark. In later years a lady called upon him 
to express her enthusiasm. She wanted to kiss his hand. 
Imagine the humor of the situation — for Mark. But 
he accepted it with perfect dignity and perfect tender 
seriousness. "How God must love you !" said the lady. 
" I hope so," said Mark gently. After she had gone, he 
observed as gently and without a smile, " I guess she 
has n't heard of our strained relations." 29 Who could 

27 



AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

help being overcome by such a man and disbelieving all 
he disbelieved? When he clasps your hand and lays his 
arm over your shoulder and whispers that life is a 
wretched, pitiable thing, and effort useless, and hope 
worthless, how are you to resist him? 

So my final, total impression of Mark is desolating. 
If his admirers rebel, declare this utterly false, and 
insist that the final impression is laughter, they should 
remember that it is they and especially Mark himself 
who are perpetually urging us to take him seriously. 
Taken seriously, he is desolating. I cannot escape the 
image of a person groping in the dark, with his hands 
blindly stretched before him, ignorant of whence he 
comes and whither he is going, yet with it all suddenly 
bursting out into peals of laughter, which, in such a 
situation, have the oddest and most painful effect. 

Yet, whatever view you take of him, if you live with 
him long, he possesses you and obsesses you; for he was 
a big man and he had a big heart. 



II 

HENRY ADAMS 



CHRONOLOGY 

Henry Adams. 

Born, Boston, Massachusetts, February 16, 1838. 

Graduated at Harvard, 1858. 

Private Secretary to his father in England, 1861-1868, 

Assistant Professor at Harvard, 1870-1877. 

Editor of the North American Review, 1870-1876. 

Married Marion Hooper, June 27, 1872. 

Wife died, December 6, 1885. 

History of United States published, 1889-1891. 

Education of Henry Adams privately printed, 1906. 

Died, Washington, March 27, 1918. 




HENRY ADAMS 



II 

HENRY ADAMS 

i 

In one of the most brilliant, subtle, and suggestive 
autobiographies ever written, Henry Adams informs us 
that he was never educated and endeavors to explain 
why his varied attempts at education were abortive. 
He flings a trumpet challenge to the universe : Here am 
I, Henry Adams. I defy you to educate me. You can- 
not do it. Apparently, by his own reiterated and tri- 
umphant declaration, the universe, after the most 
humiliating efforts, could not. 

We should perhaps sympathize with the universe 
more perfectly, since Adams asks no sympathy, if, at 
the beginning of his narrative, or even in the middle of 
it, he told us what he means by education. This he 
never does with any completeness, though the word 
occurs probably as many times as there are pages in 
the book. When he has advanced more than halfway 
through his story, he remarks casually that, for a mind 
worth educating, the object of education "should be 
the teaching itself how to react with vigor and econ- 
omy." * This is excellent, so far as it goes; but it is 
rather vague; it hardly seems to bear upon many of 
the attempted methods of education, and it does not 
reappear in any proportion to the demands upon it. I 
cannot help thinking that if in the beginning the bril- 

31 



AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

liant autobiographer had set himself sincerely and 
soberly to reflect upon the word he was to use so often, 
he would have saved himself much repetition and the 
universe some anxiety, though he would have deprived 
his readers of a vast deai of entertainment. As it is, he 
pursues an illusory phantom through a world of inter- 
esting experiences. Probably a dozen times in the 
course of the book he tells us that Adams's education 
was ended. But a few pages later the delightful task is 
taken up again, until one comes to see that to have 
ibeen educated, really and finally, would have been the 
tragedy of his life. 

At any rate, nobody could furnish a prettier keynote 
for a portrait than the motto, "always in search of 
education." * Let us follow the search through all 
its meanders of intellectual and spiritual experience. 
From birth in Boston in 1838 to death in Washington 
in 1918, through America, Europe, and the rest of the 
world, through teaching and authorship and politics 
and diplomacy, through love and friendship and the 
widest social contact, the curious and subtle soul, with 
or without the afterthought of education, pursued its 
complicated course, scattering showers of brilliancy 
about it, leaving memories of affection behind it, and 
however difficult to grasp in its passage and elusive in 
its product, always and everywhere unfailingly inter- 
esting. 

It is hardly necessary to say that, with this restless 
and unsatisfied spirit the period which sees education 
finished for most men did not even see it begun. The 
infant who starts with the definition of a teacher as "a 

32 



HENRY ADAMS 

man employed to tell lies to little boys" 8 is not very 
likely to get large results from early schooling. The 
juvenile Adams surveyed Boston and Quincy and 
found them distinctly wanting, in his eyes, though not 
in their own. "Boston had solved the universe; or had 
offered and realized the best solution yet tried. The 
problem was worked out." 4 But not for him. 

With Harvard College the results were little better. 
He fully understood that, if social position counted, he 
ought to get all there was to be got. "Of money he 
[Adams, for the autobiography is sustained throughout 
in the third person] had not much, of mind not more, 
but he could be quite certain that, barring his own 
faults, his social position would never be questioned." 5 
He was ready to admit also that failure, so far as there 
was failure, was owing precisely to faults of his own. 
"Harvard College was a good school, but at bottom 
what the boy disliked most was any school at all. He 
did not want to be one in a hundred — one per cent of 
an education." 6 Furthermore, with the willingness we 
all have to acknowledge weaknesses we should not wish 
others to find in us, he declares that "he had not wit or 
scope or force. Judges always ranked him beneath a 
rival, if he had any; and he believed the judges were 
right." 7 But, at any rate, Harvard did not educate 
him. There was no cooperation, no coordination. 
Everybody stood alone, if not apart. "It seemed a 
sign of force; yet to stand alone is quite natural when 
one has no passions; still easier when one has no 
pains." 8 And the total outcome was forlornly inade- 
quate: "Socially or intellectually, the college was for 

33 



AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

him negative and in some ways mischievous. The most 
tolerant man of the world could not see good in the 
lower habits of the students, but the vices were less 
harmful than the virtues." 9 

Nobody nowadays would anticipate that Germany 
could do what Harvard could not. But some persons 
then cherished amiable delusions. Young Adams 
hoped vaguely that Germany might educate him. 
With turns of phrase that recall Mark Twain he recog- 
nizes his happy moral fitness for education — if he 
could get it. "He seemed well behaved, when any one 
was looking at him; he observed conventions, when he 
could not escape them; he was never quarrelsome, 
towards a superior; his morals were apparently good, 
and his moral principles, if he had any, were not known 
to be bad." 10 

On this admirable substructure even Germany, 
however, could not erect the desired edifice. Acting on 
the pompous encouragement of Sumner, who said to 
him, "I came to Berlin, unable to say a word in the 
language; and three months later when I went away, 
I talked it to my cabman," n he struggled with the 
difficulties of the German tongue and overcame them 
by methods of which he says that "three months 
passed in such fashion would teach a poodle enough to 
talk with a cabman." 12 But to one so exacting, the 
mere learning of a language was not education, though 
it seems so to some people. The question was, what 
you did with the language after you learned it. And 
here Germany failed as egregiously as Boston. From 
careful personal contact, Adams concluded that the 

34 



HENRY ADAMS 

education in the public schools was hopeless. The 
memory was made sodden and soggy by enormous 
burdens. "No other faculty than the memory seemed 
to be recognized. Least of all was any use made of 
reason, either analytic, synthetic, or dogmatic. The 
German government did not encourage reasoning." 13 
The boys' bodies were disordered by bad air and ill- 
adjusted exercise, and then "they were required to 
prepare daily lessons that would have quickly broken 
down strong men of a healthy habit, and which they 
could learn only because their minds were morbid." 14 
It was hardly likely that the university teaching would 
produce a more favorable impression. It did not. 
"The professor mumbled his comments; the students 
made, or seemed to make, notes; they could have 
learned from books or discussion in a day more than 
they could learn from him in a month, but they must 
pay his fees, follow his course, and be his scholars, if 
they wanted a degree. To an American the result was 
worthless." 15 When the time came for leaving Ger- 
many, our student departed with a light heart and a 
firm resolution that, "wherever else he might, in the 
infinities of space and time, seek for education, it 
should not be again in Berlin." 16 

Many earnest persons who have found direct educa- 
tion for themselves fruitless and unprofitable, declare 
that they first began to learn when they began to teach 
and that in the education of others they discovered the 
secret of their own. After a number of years of varied 
activity, Adams returned to Harvard as a teacher and 
had an opportunity to test the truth of this principle, 

35 



AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

Viewed objectively, his work in instructing others 
seems universally commended. His pupils praised him, 
admired him, cherished a warm personal affection for 
him. He did not try to burden their memories, or to 
fill them with any theories or doctrines of his own. He 
made them think, he put life into them, intellectual 
life, spiritual life. " In what way Mr. Adams aroused 
my slumbering faculties, I am at a loss to say," writes 
Mr. Lodge; "but there can be no doubt of the fact." 17 
What greater function or service can a teacher perform 
than this? 

But for the educator himself teaching was no more 
profitable than learning. He had a keen sense of the 
responsibilities of his task. "A parent gives life, but as 
parent, gives no more. A murderer takes life, but his 
deed stops there. A teacher affects eternity; he can 
never tell where his influence stops." 18 He knew his 
own vast ignorance, as his pupils did not know theirs. 
"His course had led him through oceans of ignorance; 
he had tumbled from one ocean into another." 19 But 
the diffusion of ignorance, even conscientious, did not 
seem to him an object worth toiling for. Education, as 
administered at Harvard and at similar institutions, 
appeared to lead nowhere. The methods were wrong, 
the aims were wrong, if there were any aims. That it 
educated scholars was very doubtful; that it did not 
educate teachers was certain. "Thus it turned out 
that, of all his many educations, Adams thought that 
of school-teacher the thinnest." 20 

And how was it with society, with the wide and 
varied contact with men and women? If ever man had 

36 



HENRY ADAMS 

the chance to be educated by this means, Henry Adams 
was the man. He met all sorts of people in all sorts of 
places, met them intimately, not only at balls and din- 
ners, but in unguarded hours around the domestic 
hearth. As with the teaching, others' impression of him 
is enthusiastic. He was not perhaps the best of "mix- 
ers" in the American sense, was shy and retiring in any 
general company; but he was kindly, gracious, sympa- 
thetic, full of response, full of stimulation, full of spar- 
kling and not domineering wit. When he and Mrs. 
Adams kept open house in Washington, it was well said 
of them : "Nowhere in the United States was there then, 
or has there since been, such a salon as theirs. Sooner 
or later, everybody who possessed real quality crossed 
the threshold of 1603 H Street." 21 And again, "To his 
intimates — and these included women of wit and 
charm and distinction — the hours spent in his study 
or at his table were the best that Washington could 
give." 22 

But, as with the teaching, the man's own view of his 
general human relations is less satisfactory. The play 
of motives is interesting, certainly; but what can he 
learn from it, what can it do for his education? "All 
that Henry Adams ever saw in man was a reflection of 
his own ignorance." 23 The great obstacle for sensitive 
natures to all social pleasure, the immense intrusion of 
one's self, was always present to him, never entirely got 
rid of. "His little mistakes in etiquette or address 
made him writhe with torture." 24 And of one concrete, 
tormenting incident he says, "This might seem humor- 
ous to some, but to him the world turned ashes." 26 The 

37 



AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

annoyances were great and the compensations trifling. 
Though he touched many hands, heard many voices, 
looked deep into many eyes, he drifted through the 
world in a dream solitude. When he was in Cambridge, 
he bewailed the isolation of professors. "All these bril- 
liant men were greedy for companionship, all were 
famished for want of it." 26 But the greed and the want 
haunted him everywhere. I do not see that they were 
ever satisfied. 

With women he fared somewhat better than with 
men, and few men have been more frank about ac- 
knowledging their debt to the other sex. " In after life 
he made a general law of experience — no woman had 
ever driven him wrong; no man had ever driven him 
right." 27 And at all times and on all occasions he paid 
his debt with abundance of praise, tempered, of course, 
with such reserve as was to be expected from one who 
had all his life been seeking education and had not 
found it. To be sure, he readily admits entire ignorance 
as to the character, motives, and purposes of woman- 
kind. "The study of history is useful to the historian 
by teaching him his ignorance of women; and the mass 
of this ignorance crushes one who is familiar enough 
with what are called historical sources to realize how 
few women have ever been known." 28 But such admis- 
sion of ignorance, especially for one who triumphed in 
ignorance on all subjects, only made it easier to recog- 
nize and celebrate the charm. One could trifle with the 
ignorance perpetually, elaborate it and complicate it, 
till it took the form of the most exquisite comprehen- 
sion. "The proper study of mankind is woman and, by 

38 



HENRY ADAMS 

common agreement since the time of Adam, it is the 
most complex and arduous." 29 

Was it a question of the woman of America? One 
could write novels, like "Esther" and "Democracy," 
in which the woman of America is made a miracle of 
cleverness and is at any rate more real than anything 
else. Or, in intimate table-talk with great statesmen 
and their wives, one could calmly insist that "the 
American man is a failure: You are all failures. . . . 
Would n't we all elect Mrs. Lodge Senator against 
Cabot? Would the President have a ghost of a chance 
if Mrs. Roosevelt ran against him? " 30 But unquestion- 
ably one treads safer ground and is less exposed to the 
temptation of irony, if one goes back five hundred years 
and adores the Virgin of Ghartres. With her, as Mark 
Twain found with Joan of Arc, one can elevate the fem- 
inine ideal to a Gothic sublimity without too inconven- 
ient intrusion of harsh daylight. 

When we reduce these abstract personal contacts to 
concrete individuality, we find, or divine, Adams at his 
best, at his most human. "Friends are born, not made, 
and Henry never mistook a friend." 31 For all his vast 
acquaintance, these friendships were not many, and 
they seem to have been deep and true and lasting. To 
be sure, he complains that politics are a dangerous dis- 
solvent here as elsewhere. "A friend in power is a 
friend lost." 32 But his love for Hay and for Clarence 
King, not to speak of others, was evidently an immense 
element in his emotional life, and if they did not give 
him education, they did what was even more difficult 
and vastly better, made him forget it. Moreover, as is 

39 



AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

indicated in Mrs. La Farge's charming study of her 
uncle, there was a peculiar tenderness in Adams's in- 
timate personal relations, very subtle, very elusive, 
very delicate, but very pervading. As is the case with 
many shy and self-contained natures, this tenderness 
showed most in his contact with the young. 33 But he 
had, further, a peculiar gift of eliciting by his imagina- 
tive sympathy, affectionate confidences from young 
and old. 34 

To what we may assume to have been the deepest 
love of all Adams himself makes not the faintest refer- 
ence. His wooing and marriage are not once mentioned 
in the autobiography, but are lost in the shadowy 
twenty years which he passes over with a word. Some 
dream attachments of early childhood are touched with 
delicate sarcasm. Beyond this, love as a personal mat- 
ter does not enter into his wide analysis. From the 
comments of others we infer that, although he had no 
children, his marriage gave him as much as any human 
relation can and more than most marriages do, while 
his wife's death brought him deep and abiding sorrow. 
But we may safely conclude that marriage did not give 
him that mysterious will-o'-the wisp, education, since, 
after Mrs. Adams's death, we find him seeking it as 
restlessly and as unprofitably as ever. 

'So, having traced his search through the complicated 
phases of the more personal side of life, let us follow it 
in the even more complicated development of the intel- 
ligence. 



40 



HENRY ADAMS 

ii 

It would seem as if few human callings could afford a 
wider basis for education in the broadest sense than 
diplomacy, and Adams had the advantage of all that 
diplomacy could offer. His father cared for the inter- 
ests of the Union in London all through the fierce 
strain of the Civil War, and Henry, as his father's sec- 
retary, saw the inside working of men's hearts and 
passions which that strain carried with it. He watched 
everything curiously, gained a fascinating insight into 
the peculiarities of English statesmanship, drew and 
left to posterity profound and delicate studies of 
Palmerston, Russell, Gladstone, and other figures, 
some not soon to be forgotten and some forgotten al- 
ready. He sketched with a sure and vivid touch scenes 
of historic or human significance, like that of his ap- 
pearance in society after the capture of Vicksburg. 
Monckton Milnes, who loved the North, was there; 
Delane, the editor of the Times, who did not love the 
North, was there. Milnes rushed at Adams and kissed 
him on both cheeks. Some might imagine "that such 
publicity embarrassed a private secretary who came 
from Boston and called himself shy; but that evening, 
for the first time in his life, he happened not to be 
thinking of himself. He was thinking of Delane, whose 
eye caught his, at the moment of Milnes's embrace. 
Delane probably regarded it as a piece of Milnes's 
foolery ; he had never heard of young Adams, and never 
dreamed of his resentment at being ridiculed in the 
Times; he had no suspicion of the thought floating in the 

41 



AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

mind of the American minister's son, for the British 
mind is the slowest of all minds, as the files of the Times 
proved, and the capture of Vicksburg had not yet pene- 
trated Delane's thick cortex of fixed ideas." 35 Saint- 
Simon could not have done it better. 

But as to education for himself, the private secretary 
got nothing. In fact, these repeated, progressive, futile 
efforts seemed only to be carrying him beyond zero into 
the forlorn region of negative quantity. He found out 
that he was incurably shy, reserved, unfitted for the 
obtrusive conflicts of life. He tells us that he never had 
an enemy or a quarrel. But without quarrels it is diffi- 
cult to win victories, even in the courteous atmosphere 
of diplomacy. The result of his English experience 
tended to little but "the total derision and despair of 
the lifelong effort for education." 36 

With practical politics at home in America it was the 
same. Only here Adams, warned by varied observation 
of others, made no attempt himself at even indirect 
personal action. It became obvious to him at a very 
early age that the sharp and clear decision on matters 
that cannot be decided, which is the first thing re- 
quired of all politicians, was quite impossible for him, 
let alone the lightning facility in changing such deci- 
sions which gives the fine finish to a successful politi- 
cian's career. He had the true conservative's dislike of 
innovation, not because he was satisfied with things 
as they are, but because he had a vast dread of things 
as they might be. "The risk of error in changing a 
long-established course seems always greater to me 
than the chance of correction, unless the elements 

42 



HENRY ADAMS 

are known more exactly than is possible in human 
affairs." 37 

But if he did not seek education, where some think 
it is most surely to be found, in intense personal action, 
at least he was never tired of observing the complex- 
ities and perplexities of American political life. And if 
these did not give him education, they gave him amuse- 
ment, as they cannot fail to do his readers in his inter- 
pretation of them. He watched the doublings and 
twistings and turnings of two generations of statesmen 
in their efforts to harmonize their own ambition with 
the welfare of democracy, and to him "their sufferings 
were a long delight," 38 while he probed their souls with 
the keenest and most searching analysis. His own 
conclusion as to the workings of American government 
was not enthusiastic. Cabinets were timid, congresses 
were helter-skelter, presidents were inefficient, even 
when well-intentioned, and one could not be sure that 
they were always well-intentioned. What wonder that 
the outcome of observation so dispassionate was hardly 
educative for the observer! It certainly is not so for 
his readers, except in the sense of disillusionment. 

From the hard, harsh, clear-cut doings of practical 
America, the inquiring, acquiring spirit naturally 
turned at times to vaguer portions of the world, set 
itself to discover whether education might not come 
from travel and pure receptivity, since it absolutely 
refused to emanate from the strenuous action of com- 
mon life. The results, if hardly more satisfactory, were 
always diverting. Rome? Oh, the charm of Rome! 
But it could not well be a profitable charm: "One's 

43 



AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

personal emotions in Rome . . . must be hurtful, else 
they could have been so intense." S9 And again, Rome 
was "the last place under the sun for educating the 
young; yet it was, by common consent, the only spot 
that the young — of either sex and every race — 
passionately, perversely, wickedly loved." 40 It might 
be supposed that at least travel would break up con- 
servatism, abolish fixed habits of thought and life, 
supple the soul as well as the limbs, and make it more 
quickly receptive of innovation and experiment. Not 
with this soul, which found itself even more distrustful 
of change abroad than at home. "The tourist was the 
great conservative who hated novelty and adored 
dirt." 41 

Such a consequence might perhaps be expected from 
wandering in the Far East, where the flavor of dreamy 
repose, whether in man or nature, infected everything. 
But one would have thought that the bright, crystal, 
sparkling atmosphere of the American West might 
animate, enliven, induce a brisker courage and a more 
adventurous effort at existence. Taken beyond middle 
age, however, it did not induce effort, but only restless- 
ness: "Only a certain intense cerebral restlessness sur- 
vived which no longer responded to sensual stimulants; 
one was driven from beauty to beauty as though art 
were a trotting-match." 42 

And if the sunshine of the Western plains could not 
inspire ardor, it was not to be imagined that the gloomy 
silences of the Arctic Circle would produce it. They 
did not; they merely fed far-reaching, profound, and 
futile reflection on the battle of modern practical sci- 

44 



HENRY ADAMS 

ence with the old, dead, dumb, withering forces of 
nature. "An installation of electric lighting and tele- 
phones led tourists close up to the polar ice-cap, beyond 
the level of the magnetic pole; and there the newer 
Teuf elsdrockh sat dumb with surprise, and glared at the 
permanent electric lights of Hammerfest." 4 * 

From all this vast peregrination the conclusion is 
"that the planet offers hardly a dozen places where an 
elderly man can pass a week alone without ennui, and 
none at all where he can pass a year." 44 

Was it better with the wanderings of the spirit than 
with those of the flesh? Let us see. How was it with 
art, the world's wide, infinitely varied, inexhaustible 
human product of beauty? Surely no man ever had 
better opportunity to absorb and assimilate all that art 
has power to give to any one. Yet Adams's references to 
the influence of art in general are vague and obscure. 
He can indeed multiply paradox on that, as on any 
subject, indefinitely. "For him, only the Greek, the 
Italian, or the French standards had claims to respect, 
and the barbarism of Shakespeare was as flagrant as to 
Voltaire; but his theory never affected his practice . . . 
he read his Shakespeare as the Evangel of conservative 
Christian anarchy, neither very conservative nor very 
Christian, but stupendously anarchistic." 45 But tried 
by the one final, ever-repeated test, all that art offers 
is about as unsatisfactory as American politics or 
tropical dreams. "Art was a superb field for education, 
but at every turn he met the same old figure, like a 
battered and illegible signpost that ought to direct him 
to the next station but never did." 4€ 

45 



AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

One phase only of the vast outpouring of artistic 
beauty did engage the curious student, did for the time 
distract him wholly, involve and entangle his restless 
spirit in its fascinating spell, the mediaeval art which he 
has analyzed in "Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres." 
The strange glamour, the puzzling and elusive sugges- 
tion and intimation, of Gothic architecture, the com- 
plex subtleties of Christian thought and feeling, as 
illustrated and illuminated by that architecture, seem 
to have held him with an almost inexplicable charm; 
and the insinuating, absorbing, dominating figure of 
the Blessed Virgin, lit at once and shadowed by the 
glimmering glory of old unmatchable stained windows, 
gave him something, at least offered him the tantalizing 
image of something, that modern thought and modern 
wit and modern companionship could never supply. 

Yet even here the final impression is that of remote- 
ness and unreality. What can a living soul get from a 
dead religion? "The religion is dead as Demeter, 
and its art alone survives as, on the whole, the highest 
expression of man's thought or emotion." 47 Even to 
feel the art, you have to make yourself other than you 
are; and modern nerves, unstrung by the wide pursuit 
of education, cannot stand this pressure long. "Any 
one can feel it who will only consent to feel like a 
child. . . . Any one willing to try could feel it like the 
child, reading new thought without end into the art he 
has studied a hundred times; but what is still more 
convincing, he could at will, in an instant, shatter the 
whole art by calling into it a single motive of his 



own." 48 



46 



HENRY ADAMS 

So we must infer that the charm of this mediaeval 
interlude was largely owing to its remoteness, to the 
very fact that it was a world of dream and only dream, 
requiring of the visitor none of the vulgar positive 
action demanded by twentieth-century Washington. 
And the very remoteness that made the charm took it 
away; for souls of the twentieth century must live in 
the twentieth century, after all. 

No one lived in it more energetically than Adams, so 
far as mere thinking was concerned. To turn from his 
intimate acquaintance with mediaeval erudition to his 
equally intimate contact with the most recent move- 
ment of science is indeed astonishing. His curious 
youth seized upon the theories of Darwin, twisted 
them, teased them, tormented them, to make them 
furnish the vanishing specific which he believed himself 
to be eternally seeking. They did not satisfy him. As 
time went on, he found that they did not satisfy others, 
and he plunged more deeply and more widely into 
others' dissatisfaction, in order to confirm his own. 
The patient erudition of Germany, the logical vivacity 
of France, the persistent experimenting of England, all 
interested him, and from all he turned away as rich — 
and as poor — as he set out. No one has more gift than 
he at making scientific speculation attractive, alive, at 
giving it almost objective existence, so that you seem 
to be moving, not among quaint abstractions of 
thought, but among necessary realities, perverse, per- 
sistent creatures that may make life worth living or 
not. He embodies theory till it tramps the earth. He 
treats the pterodactyl and the ichthyosaurus with the 

47 



AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

same intimate insolence as a banker in State Street or 
an Adams in Quincy, and analyzes the weaknesses of 
terebratula with as much pride as those of his grand- 
father. 

Yet when you reflect, you think yourself at liberty 
to feel a little discontent with him, since he admits so 
much with others. His exposition of all these scientific 
questions is brilliant, paradoxical, immensely enter- 
taining. But no one makes you perceive more clearly 
the difference between brilliancy and lucidity. In mild, 
steady sunlight you can work out your way with plod- 
ding confidence; but a succession of dazzling flashes 
only makes darkness more intolerable. Adams can 
double the weight of unsolved problems upon you. He 
cannot — at least he rarely does — even state a prob- 
lem with consistent, clear, orderly method, much less 
follow out the long solution of one. His most instruc- 
tive effort in this line is the "Letter to Teachers of 
American History." Here are two hundred pages of 
glittering pyrotechnic. You read it, and are charmed 
and excited and shocked and left breathless at the end. 
What is the tangible result? That the investigations of 
modern science make it extremely doubtful whether 
mankind has progressed within the limits of recorded 
history, or ever will progress or do anything but retro- 
grade, and that this famous discovery makes the teach- 
ing of history extremely difficult. Well, it is another 
added difficulty, if the discovery is correct, which 
Adams would be the last to affirm with positiveness. 
But it might have been stated in a few words, instead 
of being amplified and complicated with endless repeti- 

48 



HENRY ADAMS 

tion, all the more puzzling for its brilliancy. And among 
the manifold serious troubles of a teacher of history, 
this one almost disappears from its very remoteness. 
Of those far more pressing, difficulties of treatment, 
difficulties of method, difficulties of practical interest, 
Adams discusses not a single one. I doubt if any 
teacher of history ever laid down the "Letter" with the 
feeling that he had been helped in any possible way. 

Of the more abstract metaphysical thinking that 
fills the latter part of the "Education" and of "Mont- 
Saint-Michel," the same may be said as of the science. 
Its breadth is astonishing and its brilliancy incom- 
parable. Every typical intelligence from Aristotle to 
Spencer is touched upon, with an especially long stop 
at Saint Thomas Aquinas to sum up and crystallize the 
whole. At first one is humbly impressed, then one is 
bewildered, then one becomes slightly sceptical. The 
result of it all seems too fluid, evanescent. Take the 
mysterious theory of acceleration. Through various 
preparatory chapters we are apparently led up to this. 
Suddenly we find that we have passed it, and we rub 
our eyes. The truth is, when analyzed, the theory of 
acceleration means that the nineteenth century moved 
rather faster than the thirteenth. But surely it needs 
no ghost come from the Middle Ages to tell us that. 
Nor does Adams's latest philosophical work, "The 
Rule of Phase Applied to History," improve matters 
much, though the idea of acceleration is further devel- 
oped in it. The argument here is condensed after a 
fashion that would seem of itself to make lucidity dif- 
ficult. But when one reflects upon such a tangle of 

49 



AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

misleading analogies, one is inclined to feel that fuller 
elaboration would only have left the lack of lucidity 
more apparent. 

And we are forced to conclude, with the metaphysics, 
as with the science, that the thinking is more stimu- 
lating than satisfying, more brilliant than profound. 
There is an acute, curious, far-reaching, unfailing in- 
terest. There is not systematic, patient, logical, clari- 
fying order and method. 

Also, with the lack of method, there is another 
spiritual defect, perhaps even more serious. The ex- 
position of all these high philosophical ideas is more 
paradoxical than passionate, and the reason is that the 
thinker himself had not passion, had not the intense, 
overpowering earnestness that alone gives metaphysi- 
cal speculations value, if not for their truth, at any rate 
for their influence. No doubt something of the impres- 
sion of dilettantism is due to the inheritance of New 
England reserve which Adams never entirely shook off. 
But the defect goes deeper, and one cannot help feeling 
that he approaches the profoundest questions of life 
and death in an attitude of amused curiosity. One 
must not take passages like the following too literally, 
and one must realize that years somewhat modified the 
flippancy of youth; but one must take them literally 
enough: "Henry Adams was the first in an infinite 
series to discover and admit to himself that he really 
did not care whether truth was, or was not, true. He 
did not even care that it should be proved true, unless 
the process were new and amusing. He was a Darwin- 
ian for fun." 49 

50 



HENRY ADAMS 

As to the last and most practical of all these varied 
spiritual attempts at education, the attempt — and 
the achievement — of authorship, one's conclusion is 
much as with the others. The novels, the biographies, 
above all, the "History of the United States," are 
among the most brilliant productions of their time. 
They glitter with epigrams and dazzle with paradoxes 
and puzzle with new interpretations and make one 
think as one has rarely thought about the problems of 
American life and character. Of them all the " History " 
is the most important and the most enduring. It is 
fascinating in parts, almost abnormally entertaining 
in parts. But even in the "History," as a whole, there is 
a lack of broad, structural conception, a tendency to 
obscure large movement by detail, sometimes divert- 
ing and sometimes tedious. 

Moreover, I cannot help feeling the defect in Adams's 
authorship that I felt in his general thinking, although 
authorship was the most serious interest of his life. He 
spent days in dusty muniment rooms, fortified his 
pages with vast labor and consistent effort, tried his 
best to make himself and others think that he was 
an earnest student of history. Yet, after all his labor 
and all his effort, I at least cannot escape the impres- 
sion that he was an author "for fun." 

in 

It is precisely in this lack of seriousness that I find 
the clue to the failure of Adams's whole colossal search 
for education, so far as the education was anything 
tangible and even the search was in any way serious. 

51 



AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

I must repeat my ample allowance for the self-depre- 
ciation common to most autobiographies as well as for 
the dignified and commendable reserve with which he 
tells his story. Both his brother and his niece insist 
upon his extreme shyness and reluctance to intrude 
his own experiences. But, after all, reserve is rather 
out of place in confessions so free and intimate as 
those of the "Education"; and through all reserve the 
exposure of the inner, the inmost, life is sufficiently 
complete to show that the perpetual demand for ed- 
ucation was fatal to any overpowering ecstasy. When 
he was a boy in college, his elders remarked that one 
of his compositions was notable for lack of enthusiasm. 
"The young man — always in search of education — 
asked himself whether, setting rhetoric aside, this 
absence of enthusiasm was a defect or a merit." 60 
Whichever it was, it accompanied him always and is 
the main key to his vast, absorbing work. What shall 
be said of a man who in recounting his own life up to 
thirty makes no single mention of having his pulses 
stirred, of being hurled out of himself by nature, or 
love, or poetry, or God? What can any education be 
that is not built on some tumultuous experience of one 
or all of these? 

Take nature. In Adams's later life there are touches 
that show that nature must always have had its hold 
on him. When he returns from Europe in 1868, he 
finds "the overpowering beauty and sweetness of the 
Maryland autumn almost unendurable for its strain 
on one who had toned his life down to the November 
grays and browns of Northern Europe." 61 Yet note 

52 



HENRY ADAMS 

even here that it is the unendurable side of passion and 
ecstasy that cling. And the same sense of superiority 
and wilful indifference peers through his wonderful 
rendering of still later natural experiences: "In the 
long summer days one found a sort of saturated green 
pleasure in the forests, and gray infinity of rest in the 
little twelfth-century churches that lined them." 52 

So with art. We have seen that he was entranced 
with the Middle Ages, and we have guessed that this 
was precisely because of their unreality to a man of the 
modern spirit. At any rate, there is no evidence any- 
where that he was rapt or carried away by any other 
art whatever, either the sculpture of Greece, or the 
painting of the fifteenth century or of the nineteenth. 
"All styles are good which amuse," he says. 53 The 
Gothic and the Virgin amused him. When he was first 
overwhelmed by the sense of Beethoven's music, he 
describes this sense in a fashion intensely characteristic 
(italics mine) as "so astonished at its own existence, 
that he could not credit it, and watched it as some- 
thing apart, accidental, and not to be trusted." 54 With 
poetry it is the same. His niece tells us he was "pas- 
sionately fond of poetry." 56 I should have taken 
"curiously fond" to be nearer the mark. In any event, 
the fondness does not appear in his writings. He en- 
larges at huge length upon the epic and lyric produc- 
tions of the Middle Ages. Except for some elaborate 
analyses of Petrarch — and this again is singularly 
characteristic — in "Esther" and "The Life of George 
Cabot Lodge," the poetry of the world might never have 
existed, for all the account his education takes of it. 

53 



AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

I have before recognized that his utter failure to deal 
with the educative power of human love may be owing 
to a delicacy that we are bound to respect. But surely 
the love of God might be handled without kid gloves. 
Adams hardly handles it with or without them. Of 
course in such an extensive syllabus of non-education 
God has his place, with pteraspis and terebratula, and 
is treated with the same familiarity as those distant 
ancestors, and the same remoteness. Adams also in- 
sists (italics mine) that "Religion is, or ought to be, a 
feeling," 56 and in many pages of " Mont-Saint-Michel " 
he shows an extraordinary power of entering into that 
feeling by intellectual analysis. But when he seeks for 
the feeling in himself, the result seems to be much 
what he describes when he seeks it in the religious press 
of the world about him: "He very gravely doubted, 
from his aching consciousness of religious void, whether 
any large fraction of society cared for a future life, 
or even for the present one, thirty years hence. Not 
an act, or an expression, or an image, showed depth 
of faith or hope." 57 As a factor in education, God 
counted for little more than terebratula. 

The truth is, that in this infinitely reiterated demand 
for education there is something too much of the ego- 
tism which Henry Adams inherited from his dis- 
tinguished great-grandfather and which had not been 
altogether dissipated by the intermixture of two gen- 
erations of differing blood, it being always recognized 
that egotism is perfectly compatible with shyness, 
reserve, and even self-effacement. In the preface to his 
autobiography Adams points out that the great les- 

54 



HENRY ADAMS 

son of Rousseau to the autobiographer was to beware 
of the Ego. In consequence Adams himself conscien- 
tiously avoids the pronoun " I " and writes of his efforts 
and failures in the third person. As a result it appears 
to me that the impression of egotism is much increased. 
We are all accustomed to the harmless habit of the 
"I"; but to have Henry Adams constantly obtruding 
Henry Adams produces a singular and in the end sin- 
gularly exasperating effect. One cannot help asking, 
What does it matter to the universe if even an Adams 
is not educated? What does it matter if fifty years of 
curious experience leave him to conclude that "He 
seemed to know nothing — to be groping in darkness 
— to be falling forever in space; and the worst depth 
consisted in the assurance, incredible as it seemed, that 
no one knew more"? 58 

Not that one does not sympathize fully with the 
admission of ignorance. The best and the wisest, the 
most earnest and the most thoughtful, admit it every- 
where. The vast acceleration in knowledge of which 
Adams complained is the distinguishing feature of the 
twentieth century. We are swamped, buried, atrophied 
in the immensity of our own learning. The specialist 
is the only relic of old wisdom that survives, and the 
specialist is but a pale and flickering torch to illumi- 
nate the general desolation. 

But even here it is Adams's attitude that is unsatis- 
factory, not his conclusions. He proclaims that his life 
is spent in an effort to seek education; but one cannot 
escape feeling that he is not very eager to find it. He 
bewails the overwhelming burden of ignorance that 

55 



AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

descends upon him, appears to bewail it; but one can- 
not help feeling that his grief is largely rhetorical and 
that, so long as ignorance enables him to gild a phrase 
or turn an epigram, he can forgive it. He "mixed him- 
self up in the tangle of ideas until he achieved a sort 
of Paradise of ignorance vastly consoling to his fa- 
tigued senses." 5d "True ignorance approaches the 
infinite more nearly than any amount of knowledge 
can do." 60 When a student so much enjoys trifling 
with the difficulties of his education, he is not likely to 
make very rapid progress in overcoming them. 

Simple and quiet as Adams himself was in his daily 
life, the thing he most mistrusted, intellectually and 
spiritually, was simplicity. "The lesson of Garibaldi, 
as education, seemed to teach the extreme complexity 
of extreme simplicity; but one could have learned this 
from a glow-worm." 61 Again: "This seemed simple as 
running water; but simplicity is the most deceitful 
mistress that ever betrayed man." 62 And he disliked 
simplicity because it was the key to all his difficulties, 
as he himself perfectly well knew. He spent his life 
tramping the world for education; but what he really 
needed was to be de-educated, and this also he was 
quite well aware of. He needed not to think, but to 
live. But he did not want to live. It was easier to sit 
back and proclaim life unworthy of Henry Adams than 
it was to lean forward with the whole soul in a passion- 
ate, if inadequate, effort to make Henry Adams worthy 
of life. Mary Lyon would have seemed to this wide 
seeker for education very humble and very benighted; 
but all Mary Lyon cared to teach her pupils was that 

56 



HENRY ADAMS 

"they should live for God and do something." 6S If she 
could have communicated some such recipe to Henry 
Adams, she might have solved his problem, though she 
would have robbed the world of many incomparable 
phrases. And even higher — and humbler — authority 
than Mary Lyon declared that we must become as lit- 
tle children if we would enter the kingdom of heaven. 
Perhaps the end of the twentieth century will take this 
as the last word of education, after all. 



Ill 

SIDNEY LANIER 



CHRONOLOGY 

Sidney Lanier. 

Born in Macon, Georgia, February 3, 1842. 

Graduated from Oglethorpe University, 1860. 

Taught at Oglethorpe University, 1860-1861. 

In Confederate service during Civil War, 1861-1865. 

In Union prison four months, 1864-1865. 

Published Tiger Lilies, 1867. 

Married Mary Day, December 21, 1867. 

Practised law, 1868-1872. 

Decided on artistic career April, 1873. 

Wrote "Centennial Cantata," 1876. 

Appointed lecturer on English literature, Johns Hopkins 

University, 1879. 
Died, Lynn, North Carolina, September 7, 1881. 



Ill 

SIDNEY LANIER 



Lanier lived in a spiritual whirlwind, until it snuffed 
him out. His whole existence was a fight with cir- 
cumstances; but if every external circumstance had 
been easy for him, still he would have nourished a 
perpetual tumult and turmoil within. Our life is no 
dreaming idyl, but " the hottest of all battles," * he says 
himself. Again, he says of his sojourn in New York, 
"lam continually and increasingly amazed at the in- 
tense rate of life at which I have to live here." 2 The 
rate at which he always lived would have astonished 
some men. 

Nor was the instinct of fighting wholly figurative or 
spiritual. As a mere child, Lanier organized a military 
company among his Georgia playmates, and drilled 
them so thoroughly that they were admitted to parade 
beside their elders. Before he was a man, the Civil 
War came, and he enlisted in the cause of his beloved 
South and served her with distinction. Military glory- 
was not the kind he sought. He was not the least of a 
bravo or a ranter, and the references in his letters to 
his military experiences are few and slight. But a 
touch now and then shows that he knew what suffering 
was and what endurance was: "Did you ever lie for a 
whole day after being wounded, and then have water 

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brought you? If so, you will know how your words 
came to me." 3 And if he had felt the agony and strain 
of war, so he responded with the keenest thrill to its 
picturesqueness, its fever of excitement, its glow and 
glory: "Our life, during this period, was as full of ro- 
mance as heart could desire. We had a flute and a 
guitar, good horses, a beautiful country, splendid resi- 
dences inhabited by friends who loved us, and plenty 
of hair-breadth escapes from the roving bands of Fed- 
erals who were continually visiting that Debateable 
Land. I look back upon that as the most delicious 
period of my life in many respects. Cliff and I never 
cease to talk of the beautiful women, the serenades, 
the moonlight dashes on the beach of fair BurwelFs 
Bay . . . and the spirited brushes of our little force 
with the enemy." 4 

But the clash of physical war was the least part of 
Lanier's fierce and constant struggles with circum- 
stance. From his youth till his death, in 1881, in his 
fortieth year, he had ill-health against him, had to con- 
tend not only with actual disease and pain, but with 
the depression and listless, hopeless discouragement, 
which disease and pain bring with them and leave be- 
hind them. The results of this incessant struggle were 
written on his face and figure, manly and dignified and 
noble as they were. The worn carriage showed it, the 
finely cut features, the deep, earnest, passionate eyes, 
the hands that were vigorous, but white and delicate. 
He understood and analyzed his condition perfectly. 
Sometimes he trumpeted those fits of exaltation which 
seem to lift the tuberculous invalid above the world: 

62 



SIDNEY LANIER 

" I feel to-day as if 1 had been a dry leathery carcass of 
a man, into whom some one had pumped strong cur- 
rents of fresh blood, of abounding life, and of vigorous 
strength. I cannot remember when I have felt so crisp, 
so springy, and so gloriously unconscious of lungs." 5 
But again he describes consumptives as "beyond all 
measure the keenest sufferers of all the stricken of this 
world," 6 or casually speaks of himself, "Tortured as I 
was this morning, with a living egg of pain away in 
under my collar bone." 7 Yet never for a moment 
could pain or lassitude subdue him or make him give 
up the struggle to do his work. In the splendid mo- 
ments of hope he worked. In the dark, dull moments 
of despair he worked. He wrote "Sunrise" when his 
temperature was 104. He delivered his last course of 
lectures when so weak that his hearers feared he would 
expire in the chair. If ever a man died fighting, he did. 
All these strains and torments of ill-health are bad 
enough when one has means to meet them, can afford 
at least the necessary lenitives, without anxiety as to 
where every dollar is coming from. This was far from 
being the case with Lanier. No one ever lived who was 
more indifferent to money in itself than he, who would 
have cared less for the excitement or the satisfaction 
of accumulating wealth. He did not even long for 
the finer luxuries and elegancies that go with wealth, 
though every artist can sympathize with the remark of 
Gray: "Swift somewhere says, that money is liberty; 
and I fear money is friendship too and society, and al- 
most every external blessing. It is a great though ill- 
natured comfort to see most of those who have it in 

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AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

plenty without pleasure, without liberty, and without 
friends." 8 With Lanier it was a case of hard, bitter 
struggle for actual necessaries. Brought up in the full 
taste of Southern ease and abundance, he found him- 
self, at the close of the war, like so many Southerners, 
beginning life in the most cramping bonds of poverty, 
obliged to fight his way upward from the bottom against 
every difficulty that material obstacles could oppose to 
him. Determined as he was to win success in lines of 
work not in themselves profitable, or only rarely and 
poorly so, he could not labor to get money with the 
single energy which is most of all necessary to achieve 
that result. 

How desperate, how constant, how blighting this 
need of money was is written all through Lanier's bi- 
ography and letters. Bread, mere, bare bread is the 
word that occurs and recurs. Indiscreet utterance 
"may interfere with one's already very short allowance 
of bread." 9 Again, "My head and my heart are both 
so full of poems which the dreadful struggle for bread 
does not give me time to put on paper." 10 

Any honest means of earning is resorted to. To all 
are given earnest, conscientious effort. Comfort and 
independence are achieved from none. Teaching? The 
last pitiful refuge of those who have immortal thoughts 
to sell? "'Tis terrible work, and the labor difficulties 
. . . make the pay very slim." " Government em- 
ployment? It requires influence, and immortal thoughts 
are the last requisite for it. " I have allowed a friend to 
make application to every department in Washington 
for even the humblest position . . . but without suc- 

64 



SIDNEY LANIER 

cess." 12 The strain wears out body, wears out soul, 
wears out courage, wears out hope. "Altogether it 
seems as if there was n't any place for me in this world, 
and if it were not for May, I should certainly quit it, in 
mortification at being so useless." 13 To some it ap- 
pears that his physical decay has a physical cause; but 
he finds the cause rather in "the bitterness of having 
to spend my time in making academic lectures and 
boy's books — pot-boilers all — when a thousand songs 
are singing in my heart that will certainly kill me if I 
do not utter them soon." 14 

For among all these external struggles, the most in- 
tense and passionate, made of course doubly so by the 
distraction of the others, was the struggle for reputation, 
recognition, success in the positive career, or careers, 
since music was almost as dear to him as poetry, 
that he had chosen for himself. And in this struggle, 
more than in any other, come the fierce alternations 
of hope and despair. "Through poverty, through pain, 
through weariness, through sickness . . . these two fig- 
ures of music and of poetry have steadily kept in my 
heart so that I could not banish them." 15 But some- 
times they hover close with intimate glory, making all 
life golden, and the past sacred and the future sure; 
sometimes they fade and shift and almost vanish, serv- 
ing rather as an added torment than as a support or 
refuge. 

In the first rapture of achievement, after the toil and 
travail of creation, work actually finished seems worth 
doing, seems never indeed a full realization of one's 
ideal, but seems at any rate to embody something of 

65 



AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

what one aimed at, what one hoped for. One is proud 
of it, if not satisfied with it, and above all one is in- 
spired by what one has done with infinite confidence in 
what one can do. "So many great ideas for Art are 
born to me each day, I am swept away into the land of 
All-Delight by their strenuous sweet whirlwind." 16 
And then comes the reaction and the despair. What 
seemed yesterday a masterpiece, to-day sounds dull 
and poor and tawdry, and that land of All-Delight be- 
comes merely barren as your heart. 

As some stay against this wretched self-distrust, this 
bankruptcy of confidence, you must have the recogni- 
tion of others. There are times when your own ap- 
proval is enough. There are times when it seems as 
nothing, and even so you cannot get it. Then a simple 
word of appreciation may bring heaven to you. To be 
sure, instead of appreciation there may be indifference 
and neglect, and the dread of these may tempt you to 
hug your own approval in self-sufficient solitude: "I'd 
like to send a poem or two occasionally, or an essay; 
but I dread rejection like a mad lover." 17 Yet you 
send the poem and you face the public, and if you 
have genius as Lanier had, the moments of recogni- 
tion and glory will come, however rare, and the rarer 
the sweeter. To be told by an intelligent admirer 
"that I was not only the founder of a school of music, 
but the founder of American music," 18 is intoxicating, 
even if you do not believe it. Even more intoxicating 
is it to feel and see that you have carried a great 
company of people out of themselves, as Lanier so 
often did by his wonderful flute-playing. "When I 

66 



SIDNEY LANIER 

allowed the last note to die, a simultaneous cry of pleas- 
ure broke forth from men and women that almost 
amounted to a shout, and I stood and received the 
congratulations that thereupon came in, so wrought 
up by my own playing with thoughts, that I could 
but smile mechanically, and make stereotyped returns 
to the pleasant sayings, what time my heart worked 
falteringly, like a mouth that is about to cry." 19 

And even such triumph is not enough for the eager 
spirit; but it yearns for more creation and more recog- 
nition and more and more. There is no bound, no limit, 
because beauty is limitless and life is limitless. To be 
the founder of American music would be well; but 
might there not be something more than that, some- 
thing, who can tell what? In debating the true bent of 
his genius, Lanier says: "I cannot bring myself to be- 
lieve that I was intended for a musician, because it 
seems so small a business in comparison with other 
things which, it seems to me, I might do." 20 And so 
through all the long and bitter struggle with circum- 
stance the soul goes staggering, reaching onward, with 
no rest, no respite, because the outer struggle is but the 
image and reflection of the deeper and more passionate 
struggle within. 

II 

For Lanier's was none of those contented spirits who 
meet the battle of the world with a quiet and self- 
subdued mastery, who oppose to its rude shocks the 
unfailing tenacity of a clear and four-square purpose. 
With him the inner wopM was as full of battle as the 

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AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

outer. His thinking life was one long effort to solve 
problems, to break through difficulties instead of dodg- 
ing them, to reach the last analysis of his own soul and 
the souls of others. "Intellectually," says one who 
knew him well, "he seemed to me not so much to have 
arrived as to be on the way, — with a beautiful fervor 
and eagerness about things." 21 He was always on the 
way, always would have been, moving, growing, devel- 
oping, longing. Life could never have stood still for 
him, never have stagnated. There was always some 
problem to be met, to be fought with, to be conquered. 
For such a nature the moral life meant struggle, of 
course. Little errors became great sins and had to be 
mourned over with a repentance wholly out of propor- 
tion to the fault. "My father, I have sinned. With 
what intensity of thought, with what deep and earnest 
reflection have I contemplated this lately ! My heart 
throbs with the intensity of- its anguish." 22 But the 
same ardor was carried into the aesthetic world, also. 
The enjoyment of great beauty, in music or in poetry, 
was not a serene enchantment, a mere ecstatic oblivion, 
but was sought with suffering and maintained with 
long effort and paid for too often with enormous lassi- 
tude. Spiritual delight is dearly bought, perhaps not 
too dearly bought, but dearly bought, at any rate, 
when it has to be described like this: "I have just con- 
cluded a half-dozen delicious hours, during which I 
have been devouring, with a hungry ferocity of rapture 
which I know not how to express, 'The Life of Robert 
Schumann.'" 23 And Lanier's own criticism of this 
same Schumann is certainly by no means true of Lanier 

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SIDNEY LANIER 

himself: "His sympathies were not big enough, he did 
not go through the awful struggle of genius, and lash 
and storm and beat about until his soul was grown 
large enough to embrace the whole of life and the All 
of things." 24 

Even in matters of pure intelligence, not essentially 
aesthetic or emotional, even in curious metaphysical or 
psychological speculations, of no direct bearing on the 
conduct of life, Lanier showed the same intensity and 
activity and sincerity. To Mark Twain thought was 
an amusing diversion, to Henry Adams it was a splen- 
did stimulant of curiosity, to Lanier it was a despotic 
master. He thought with passion, did not play with 
ideas or trifle with them, but threw himself upon 
them, fiercely determined to get rid of the rags and 
shroudings of tradition and convention and thrust way 
down to the solid structure of naked verity. "Thought, 
too," he says, "is carnivorous. It lives on meat. We 
never have an idea whose existence has not been pur- 
chased by the death of some atom of our fleshly tis- 
sue." 25 He never had, at any rate, and he paid for 
intellectual emancipation with throbbing fragments of 
his heart. He speaks somewhere of "the Latin works 
of Lucretius, whom I have long desired to study," 26 
and in whom he found a friend. For in all literature 
and in all thought there is no soul who made thinking 
more of a battle than Lucretius did, and Lanier is like 
him. ^ 

It is this fighting quality of the analysis, rather than 
its actual result, that gives a profound interest to La- 
nier's critical writings. His books on the English novel 

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AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

and on the science of English verse may not have 
permanent critical value. Their ample abundance of 
theorizing may not always work out to a final and sat- 
isfying illumination of fact. But there is an intensity, 
a throb, in their spiritual movement that whirls you 
along with it, whether you agree or not. Indeed, the 
intellectual activity is too great for clarity. Every 
simplest element and principle is subjected to an un- 
compromising test of investigation and is torn to pieces 
with an ingenuity of insight which discovers fine 
threads of affinity and causality hardly perceptible to 
ordinary, coarser vision. Again, as with Lucretius, one 
feels that one is battered with a storm of solutions for 
problems that can be solved more simply or need not 
be solved at all. And, as with Lucretius, one is some- 
times moved to pity, to see such a splendid intelligence 
wearing itself out for futile results. 

But the passion for theory, for getting to the bottom 
of things, is infectious, just the same. It inspires La- 
nier's readers to-day. It inspired all who listened to his 
admirable lecturing at Johns Hopkins and elsewhere. 
The passion is manifest not only in Lanier's formal 
criticism, but in all his writing and thinking. "I don't 
mean this for a theory," he says in one case; "I hate 
theories." 27 But, hate them or not, he was born to 
theorize; not to accept blindly the theories of others, 
not to wallow widely in inherited formulae: "Why do 
we cling so to humbugs?" 28 he cries. But into hum- 
bugs and into the crowding facts of life and into the 
elusive secrets of passion he loved to plunge the fine 
instrument of thought and twist it and turn it, with a 

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SIDNEY LANIER 

touching confidence that it would at last lead him to 
the inmost shrine of truth. He was no disbeliever in 
intellect, no doubter of the supremacy of reason, he 
was not smothered with education until he came to 
despise it altogether, like Henry Adams. He believed 
that the secrets of God could be wrestled for, that 
every good thing was an object of combat and conquest, 
and that, whatever peace might be in heaven, life on 
this earth, to be life at all, must be perpetual war. "A 
soul and a sense linked together in order to fight each 
other more conveniently, compose a man." 29 

in 

At the same time I would not give the impression that 
Lanier was always fighting, that he was one of those 
uncomfortable persons who thrust their combative 
tendencies into the face of every interlocutor or house- 
mate. Far from it. His external battles were confined 
to proper occasions, and such unfailing conflict as he 
had within was masked by perfect control and gracious 
dignity and ease. To chat with him an hour you would 
never suspect that he carried a world war in his heart. 

Moreover, like all great fighters whose fights are 
worth anything, he had his hours of peace, his intervals 
of relaxation, when he could forget the fierce violence 
of thought. His appeal to tranquillity does indeed seem 
more like a longing than a hope : 

"Oh! as thou liv'st in all this sky and sea 
That likewise lovingly do live in thee, 
So melt my soul in thee, and thine in me, 
Divine Tranquillity!" 30 

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AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

Yet even in the furious ardor of his art there were 
charming moments of refreshment and repose. Crea- 
tion was a struggle, but the struggle of creation af- 
forded a comparative respite from the colder and more 
hopeless struggle of thought. After spending long 
hours and long years in the endeavor to disentangle 
theological complications, aesthetic delight seemed at 
least sure and enduring, however it tantalized, and the 
disheartened thinker could cry, with a feeling of relief, 
"an unspeakable gain has come to me in simply turn- 
ing a certain phrase the other way : the beauty of holi- 
ness becomes a new and wonderful saying to me when 
I figure it to myself in reverse as the holiness of 
beauty." 31 

Music, though in a sense more than any the art of 
struggle, though its essence seems to consist of effort 
for the impossible, of discords resolved only to be 
perpetually renewed and to seek for new resolution 
forever, music has its suggestions of wide quiet and 
all-involving peace, only the more celestial for their 
rarity. Writing, which at times tears the soul to shreds 
with its turbulent effort, which at times means only a 
vain, futile, exhausting wrestle with thoughts that will 
not be disciplined and words that flit away, writing 
also has its glorious compensations, when all the puz- 
zles vanish, and sudden, splendid phrases come from 
unknown depths and fit into their perfect sequence 
with divine smooth ease. "I can't tell you with what 
ravishing freedom and calmness I find myself writing, 
in these days, nor how serene and sunny the poetic 
region seems to lie, in front, like broad upland fields 

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SIDNEY LANIER 

and slopes. I write all the time, and sit down to the 
paper with the poems already done." 32 

And there was other more common human relaxation 
also, hours of putting work aside and thought aside 
altogether and just dabbling in sunshine and simple 
pleasantness. Like most Southerners, Lanier loved a 
good horse, and a rush through the nipping winter wind 
helped to shake out the creases in his soul and brush 
the crumbs of doubt from them. " I have at command 
a springy mare, with ankles like a Spanish girl's, upon 
whose back I go darting through the green overgrown 
woodpaths like a thrasher about his thicket." 33 
And he found and loved the repose of Nature even 
more than her activity. He knew well that the best 
medicine for the insupportable fatigue of thought is 
the quiet of green fields and the mellow oblivion of 
autumn sunshine. Sometimes he simply touches the 
soothing features of the outward world and leaves the 
peace they brought him for the reader to divine: "The 
sun is shining with a hazy and absent-minded face, as 
if he were thinking of some quite other star than this 
poor earth; occasionally a little wind comes along, not 
warm, but unspeakably bland, bringing strange scents 
rather of leaves than of flowers." 34 Sometimes he 
makes perfectly plain what Nature does for him and 
what she might do for you also: "To-day you must 
forego expression and all outcome, you must remain a 
fallow field, for the sun and wind to fertilize, nor shall 
any corn or flowers sprout into visible green and red 
until to-morrow." 35 

Nor is he always serious in his relaxation, but recog- 

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AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

nizes that sweet and kindly laughter relieves tense 
nerves and fervid brains more completely than al- 
most anything else, that it at once indicates that the 
soul is free from care and makes it so. What could be 
more sunny than the freakish humor that runs through 
the history of Bob, the mocking-bird? And laughter 
not only relaxed, but comforted; for the harsh pressure 
of circumstance, and the bitterness of neglect and re- 
jection were made more tolerable by it. A man could 
not play more lightly with the peace of home after 
poverty-stricken wandering than in phrases like these: 
"I confess I am a little nervous about the gas-bills, 
which must come in, in the course of time . . . but then 
the dignity of being liable for such things! is a very sup- 
porting consideration. No man is a Bohemian who has 
to pay water-rates and a street tax. Every day when 
I sit down in my dining-room — my dining-room! — I 
find the wish growing stronger that each poor soul in 
Baltimore, whether saint or sinner, could come and 
dine with me. How I would carve out the merry- 
thoughts for the old hags! How I would stuff the big 
wall-eyed rascals till their rags ripped again." 36 

As these words indicate, his social, human instincts 
went always abreast with his love of merriment. The 
true life of his soul was solitary, but he would step out 
of it at any time to feel the warm touch of his fellows 
and revel in it. And his heart gave warmth as well as 
drank it in. His large, sunny cheerfulness was infec- 
tious, inspired cheerfulness in all about him, even 
strangers. As one who knew him well said, " If he took 
his place in a crowded horse-car, an exhilarating at- 

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SIDNEY LANIER 

mosphere seemed to be introduced by his breezy 
ways." 37 Or, as he himself expressed it, from the 
deeper, inner point of view, "any bitterness is there- 
fore small and unworthy of a poet." 38 Not but that he 
had a temper, could feel a poet's fiery indignation at 
wrong or meanness or injustice, as when he stood up in 
his place, in the middle of an orchestra rehearsal, and 
told the conductor who had spoken brutally to a young 
woman at the piano just what he thought of him. 39 
But the temper never hardened into sullenness, never 
secreted a long grudge or a blighting quarrel. "I was 
never able to stay angry in my life." 40 

He liked to share his pleasures with his friends, too. 
He recognized that music is the eminently social art 
and entered with a splendid, ardent zest into the com- 
mon enjoyment of it. He delighted in a fascinating 
human mixture of tangled diversions, "Kinsfolk, men 
friends, women friends, books, music, wine, hunting, 
fishing, billiards, tenpins, chess, eating, mosquitoless 
sleeping, mountain scenery, and a month of idleness." 41 
He stepped out with ease and grace from the exclusive 
society of high thoughts: "I hope those are not illegiti- 
mate moods in which one sometimes desires to sur- 
round one's self with a companionship less awful, and 
would rather have a friend than a god." 42 He even 
recognized that the friction of brains with each other is 
sometimes necessary to push thought to its highest: 
"There's not enough attrition of mind on mind here, 
to bring out any sparks from a man." 43 

Lastly, and perhaps in Lanier's case most important, 
among all the forms of refuge and repose from the harsh 

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AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

struggle of existence we must place the mighty solace of 
domestic love and home. Lanier married quite early a 
very charming woman, and her companionship and 
comfort were the greatest possible relief in all his trou- 
bles and difficulties. Though he wandered widely and 
his artist's calling took him among all sorts of people 
and made him friends with all sorts, there was nothing 
of the Bohemian in his nature. He loved the ties of 
life, all of them; did not find them ties but sweet inti- 
macies; loved to bind the large divagation of his spirit 
to the quiet daily habits of hearth and home. And 
he shared all his ecstasies and enthusiasms with her 
whom he loved, so far as such things can be shared 
on this solitary and confining earth. If great beauty 
came to him in her absence, his enjoyment of it was 
not quite perfect, not quite satisfying without her: 
"For I mostly have great pain when music, or any 
beauty, comes past my way, and thou art not by. 
Perhaps this is because music takes us out of prison, 
and I do not like to leave prison unless thou goest 
also." 44 Again, "Oh, if thou couldst but be by me in 
this sublime glory of music! All through it I yearned 
for thee with heart-breaking eagerness." 45 And the 
solace of childhood, its grace, its gayety , its wild, way- 
ward self-assertion, shifting into absolute dependence, 
varied exquisitely the mood of this higher companion- 
ship. " Nothing could be more keen, more fresh, more 
breezy, than the meeting together of their little im- 
mense loves with the juicy selfishness and honest 
animalisms of the dear young cubs." 46 While the 
affection for children and wife both is enlarged and 

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SIDNEY LANIER 

interfused with the wider charity which aims to spread 
its all involving grasp over those near and far away 
and like and unlike: "Let us lead them to love every- 
thing in the world, above the world, and under the 
world adequately; that is the sum and substance of a 
perfect life." 47 

IV 

Yet, after all, these elements of repose and distraction, 
even the most sacred, were but secondary to the mighty 
effort and struggle to succeed, to achieve, to do great 
things in the world, to leave a name that should never 
die. And one asks one's self, as in so many similar 
cases, but especially with Lanier, because the struggle 
was so definite and so desperate, what was the motive 
back of it all? Why should a man fling aside health and 
wealth and ease and the endless variety of ephemeral 
diversion to give the world what it never asks for 
and to demand of it in return what it yields only 
with brutal reluctance and usually too late ? What is 
the fierce sting, the cruel, driving spur that urges the 
artist onward, till one is sometimes almost tempted to 
conclude that genius consists in the sting itself even 
more than in the gifts and powers that it forces to its 
service? 

Is it the mere desire of praise, of applause, of having 
men honor you and esteem you, point you out and seek 
your work and treasure it, volitare per ora virorum, as 
the Latin poet expressed it better than any one has ex- 
pressed it since? The best and wisest have recognized 
this motive, sometimes frankly, sometimes reluctantly 

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AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

and with vain effort to hide it under other names. The 
young Milton knew well that 

"Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise." 

Lanier, who analyzed and dissected everything, did 
not overlook the value of praise in all its forms: 
"Much reflection convinces me that praise is no ignoble 
stimulus, and that the artist should not despise it." 48 
"Although I am far more independent of praise than 
formerly, and can do without it perfectly well: yet, 
when it comes, I keenly enjoy it." 49 

Again, besides the mere love of fame and of ap- 
plause, there is in the artist the passionate desire to 
create things beautiful. This seems to be quite differ- 
ent from the appreciation of such things, though nat- 
urally such appreciation is implied in it. There are 
plenty of persons whose sense of all beauty is exquisite, 
evidently as exquisite as that of any creative artist, 
who yet are content to absorb and never to give out, 
who never apparently have the impulse to reproduce 
or rival the masterpieces that give them the intensest 
pleasure of their lives. But the artist cannot rest with- 
out the devouring effort to realize a new beauty, a 
different beauty, a beauty more overwhelming, more 
enduring than even that which intoxicates his whole 
being as he receives it from others. Many doubtless 
have felt this passion as keenly as Flaubert and Keats. 
None has more passionately recorded it. It is the cry 
that echoes in Phineas Fletcher's simple line, 

"Ah, singing let me live and singing die." 
It echoes everywhere in the letters of Sidney Lanier. 

78 



SIDNEY LANIER 

"It was a spiritual necessity, I must be a musician, I 
could not help it." 60 "The fury of creation is upon 
me." 61 "This unbroken march of beautiful-bodied 
Triumphs irresistibly invites the soul of a man to cre- 
ate other processions like it. I would I might lead a so 
magnificent file of glories into heaven." " 

And with the instinct of creating beauty, there is the 
instinct of diffusing it. In some artists this appears to 
be lacking. They are content to achieve the beautiful, 
to scatter it about them, to leave it behind them, with- 
out considering or caring whether the world learns to 
enjoy it or not. Not theirs to create the hearing ear or 
the seeing eye. Let such creep in their traces and slowly 
arrive at comprehension. It was different with Lanier. 
He burned to make others feel what he felt, all that he 
felt. Beauty was not to be his alone, whether con- 
ceived or created. It was to light the whole wide world 
with a radiant glory. "We are all striving for one end," 
he cried, transfiguring other artists with his own ardor, 
and that is "to develop and ennoble the humanity of 
which we form a part." 63 He could not understand that 
musicians could be content to give subtle aesthetic emo- 
tion to a few, when it was possible to "set the hearts of 
fifteen hundred people afire." 64 

So we analyze vaguely, imperfectly, the deep mo- 
tives that lay at the root of such a life struggle as 
Lanier's. Yet who shall say that we have quite touched 
the secret, or really, finally explained why a man 
should be willing to wear out his life striving, striving, 
striving for a goal that forever fades away? 



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v 
As we have analyzed the nature of the struggle and its 
fury and its motive, so let us consider its outcome and 
result. There is the result for the artist himself and 
the result for others. And for himself there is no doubt 
that the struggle means life. It often means death 
also, as it did for Keats and for Lanier. Oftener still 
it means death in life, health shattered through long 
years, nerves broken and unstrung, quivering to utter 
exhaustion with misdirected effort and inadequate 
desire. The joy of successful creation is shot through 
with ardor that consumes even while it intoxicates. 
" Our souls would be like sails at sea; and the irresistible 
storm of Music would shred them as a wind shreds can- 
vas, whereof the fragments writhe and lash about in 
the blast which furiously sports with their agony." M 
Yet withal he who has once tasted the creative rapture 
knows nothing else that can be called living beside it. 
Certainly Lanier's testimony on the point is as explicit 
as any one's: "To die, consumed by these heavenly 
fires: — that is infinitely better than to live the tepid 
lives and love the tepid loves that belong to the lower 
planes of activity." 50 And if he says so, it is beyond 
question true for him; for no man ever lived more fully 
for the rapture or died more patently from the domina- 
tion of it. 

And the result for others? In Lanier's case, the value 
of example is clear, even disregarding actual achieve- 
ment. He was a Southerner, always a Southerner. He 



SIDNEY LANIER 

loved the South, and the South loved and loves him. 
And in his day the spur of that glorious spirit, ever 
toiling, ever hoping, giving up all material success for 
the long pursuit of an ideal, was the very stimulus that 
the young men of the South needed above all others. 
Who shall say that the young men of the whole coun- 
try do not need and cannot profit by it now? 

Moreover, Lanier's ardent struggle bore fruit in a 
considerable literary product. Of this the prose crit- 
icism and other writings have their value and will 
probably continue to be read with pleasure by a limited 
number. But it is the poems that give their author a 
permanent place in American literature. With their 
purely literary quality the psychographer does not con- 
cern himself. The testimony of critics of different 
schools is enough on this point. But to one who comes 
to the poems fresh from the close study of Lanier's in- 
ner life, they must necessarily prove a little disappoint- 
ing. He gave them grace and dignity and charm and, 
above all, music; but why could he not put his soul into 
them? He gave them thought and observation, magic 
of description, and witchery of movement; but why 
could he not put his soul into them? Flaubert dili- 
gently kept his soul out of his novels, and the conse- 
quence is that the letters to Mademoiselle X are worth 
a dozen "Salammbos" and "Education Sentimen- 
tales." But with Flaubert it was a matter of theory. 
With Lanier it would seem to be rather an instinctive 
reserve. Lucretius made all life a fight, as Lanier made 
it; Lucretius, of whom Lanier himself says, 



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AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

"Lucretius mine 
(For oh, what heart hath loved thee like to this 
That's now complaining?)" 57 

Then Lucretius took the dullest subjects in the world, 
and, because he poured the whole of his fighting soul 
into them, he left the tangled thorns through which he 
tore his way all glorified with shreds of luminous im- 
mortality. Lanier chose the most promising, the most 
poetical subjects; but somehow the battling spirit is 
not there. As he himself most aptly says of another, 
"There is a certain something — a flame, a sentiment, 
a spark kindled by the stroke of the soul against sorrow, 
as of steel against flint — which he hath not" 58 " Sun- 
rise" and "The Marshes of Glynn" are no doubt mu- 
sical, magical, enduring poetry. But there is more to 
stir my spirit in the following lines, which throb with 
the actual passion of the long, despairing fight: 

"Given, these, 
On this, the coldest night in all the year, 
From this, the meanest garret in the world, 
In this, the greatest city in the land, 
To you, the richest folk this side of death, 
By one, the hungriest poet under heaven, 

— Writ while his candle sputtered in the gust, 
And while his last, last ember died of cold, 
And while the mortal ice i* the air made free 
Of all his bones and bit and shrunk his heart, 
And while soft Luxury made show to strike 
Her gloved hands together and to smile 
What time her weary feet unconsciously 
Trode wheels that lifted Avarice to power, 

— And while, moreover, — thou God, thou God -a 
His worshipful sweet wife sat still, afar, 

Within the village whence she sent him forth 

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SIDNEY LANIER 

Into the town to make his name and fame, 
Waiting, all confident and proud and calm, 
Till he should make for her his name and fame, 
Waiting — Christ, how keen this cuts! — large-eyed, 
With Baby Charley till her husband make 
For her and him a poet's name and fame." M 

Here, at any rate, we have a shred of Lanier's heart. 



IV 

james McNeill whistler 



CHRONOLOGY 

James (Abbott) McNeill Whistler. 

Born, Lowell, Massachusetts, July 10, 1834, 

In Russia, 1843-1848. 

At West Point, 1851-1854. 

Went to Paris to study, 1855. 

Painted mainly in London and Paris till his death. s 

Ruskin trial, 1878. 

Venice, 1879, 1880. 

Married Beatrix (Philip) Godwin, August 11, 1888. 

Wife died, May 10, 1896. 

Died in London, July 17, 1903. 




james mcneill whistler 



IV 

james McNeill whistler 



The problem with Whistler is to reconcile a great 
artist with a little man; or, if not a little man, an odd 
man, an eccentric man, a curious, furious creature, 
who flitted through the world, making epigrams and 
enemies, beloved and hated, laughing and laughable, 
and painting great pictures. He was glorified by his 
hand and damned by his tongue. 

The task of disentangling this snarled soul is made 
much more difficult by the perplexity of records. What 
little he himself wrote helps, so far as it goes. But it 
does not go far; and we have largely to deal with a 
cloud of legend, sometimes rosy, sometimes lurid, ac- 
cording to the reporter, but always obscuring and 
deceitful. Anecdotes are told in a dozen different ways, 
and there is seldom that care for verbal authenticity 
which is essential with a spirit at once so precise and so 
evasive. The chroniclers are baffling, when they mean 
to be helpful. The shrewd invent, the dull misappre- 
hend. Take a single instance. One of the best-known 
Whistler stories is that of the answer to a lady who 
declared that there was no one like Whistler and Velas- 
quez: "Madam, why drag in Velasquez?" An obsequi- 
ous follower actually inquired of the Master, whether 
he really meant this. l When they are subjected to such 

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Boswells, who can blame the Doctor Johnsons and the 
Whistlers for running riot? 

Whistler was born in Lowell, like other great men. 
He did not like it, would have preferred his mother's 
Southern dwelling-place, and sometimes implied that 
he was born in Baltimore. He declared in court that he 
was born in Saint Petersburg. He once said to an 
inquisitive model: "My child, I never was born. I came 
from on high"; and the model answered, with a friv- 
olous impertinence that charmed him, "I should say 
you came from below." 2 He was as reticent about his 
age as he was about his birthplace. But the hard fact 
is that he was born in Lowell in 1834. To be born in 
Lowell, to grow up in Russia, to be educated at West 
Point, to paint in France and England, with vague 
dashes to Venice and Valparaiso, and to die in London 
at seventy make a sufficiently variegated career. Even 
so, it was less variegated without than within. 

Through the whole of it his life was in the pencil and 
brush, and the world to him was a world of line and 
color. As a small child he drew in Russia and laughed 
at the painting of Peter the Great. At West Point he 
drew his instructors, mockingly. In the Coast Survey 
service he made exquisite official drawings — and odd 
faces on the margins of them. And, till he died, laugh- 
ter and fighting may have been his diversions, but 
drawing and painting were his serious business. 

The only serious one. Few human beings have taken 
less interest in the general affairs of men. Even for the 
other arts he had little thought to spare, except as they 
affected his own. Poetry did not touch him, unless an 

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james McNeill whistler 

occasional jingle. Tragedy he found ludicrous. He 
liked to fetch analogies from music, but he knew noth- 
ing about it and cared nothing for it. When Sarasate 
was being painted and played for him, Whistler was 
fascinated with the flight of the bow up and down the 
strings. The music escaped him. 

Apparently he read little, except to gratify a special 
fancy. He adored Poe. He read Balzac and the writers 
of that group. The Pennells insist that he must have 
read widely, because he had so much general informa- 
tion. Others say that he rarely touched a book. Prob- 
ably the truth is that his reading was limited, but that 
a most retentive memory kept forever anything that 
impressed him. However this may be, in all the records 
and biographies I have found little trace of his convers- 
ing or wishing to converse on ordinary topics of general 
interest. 

To politics and the wide range of social questions he 
was utterly indifferent. He hated journalists because 
they talked about him and politicians because they did 
not. He praised America and things American at a 
distance, but American democracy would not have 
pleased him. In one sense he was democratic himself; 
for a street-sweeper who could draw would have inter- 
ested him more than a British peer who only patronized 
art. "The Master was a Tory," says Mr. Menpes. 
"He did not quite know why ; but, he said, it seemed to 
suggest luxury; and painters, he maintained, should be 
surrounded with luxury. He loved kings and queens 
and emperors, and had a feeling that his work should 
only be bought by royalty." s 

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AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

With religion the attitude was about as elementary. 
Whistler dreaded death and avoided it and the thought 
of it. 4 He believed in a future life and could not under- 
stand those people who did not. 5 He even pushed this 
belief as far as spiritualism, took a lively interest in 
mediums and table-rappings and communications from 
the dead. Also, he had been brought up in a strict, 
almost Puritanic discipline, and the Bible had burned 
itself into his memory so that it colored much of his 
utterance. But I do not find that religious emotion or 
reflection had any large place in his life. He was im- 
mensely busy in this world and left the next to take 
care of itself. God is occasionally mentioned in his 
writings, but very rarely, and then with kindness, but 
with little interest: "God, always good, though some- 
times careless." 6 In general, his religious tone is ad- 
mirably conveyed by the anecdote of the dinner at 
which he listened in unusual silence to an animated 
and extensive discussion between representatives of 
various sects. At last Lady Burton turned to him 
and said, "And what are you, Mr. Whistler?" "I, 
madam?" he answered, using the word with which he 
would have liked to stop the mouths of all those who 
chattered about his own pursuit in life, "I, madam? 
Why, I am an amateur." 7 

The same ignorance of the broader thought and 
movement of the world very naturally permeates 
even Whistler's elaborate discussions of his own art. 
The theories of the celebrated "Ten O'Clock" lecture, 
that art is a casual thing, and cometh and goeth where 
it listeth, that the artist happens, that there are no 

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james McNeill whistler 

artistic people or periods, and that art has nothing to 
do with history, are shrewd, apt, and, as a protest 
against pedantry, in many ways just. But they are 
incoherent and chaotic, more witty than philosophical, 
and more significant of Whistler than of truth. Above 
all, they are intimately related to the wide ignorance 
and indifference I have been commenting on. Whistler 
made much of his musical analogies. If he had thought 
a little more deeply on music, he might have used 
another — or he might not. For music is indisputably 
and naturally what he always sought to make painting, 
the art of ignorance, the art, that is, which appeals 
directly to the emotions and does not require for its 
appreciation any wide training or experience in history 
or the general interests of human life. It is for this 
reason that music, even more than painting, seems 
destined to become the all-engrossing, all-devouring 
art of the future. 

And as Whistler was indifferent to human concerns 
outside his art in a theoretical way, so he carried the 
same indifference into practical action. He lived to 
paint, or to talk about painting; all else was pastime, 
and most things hardly that. Money? He could some- 
times drive a hard bargain, but it was a question of 
pride in his own work, not of meanness. Otherwise, 
money slipped through his fingers, though in the early 
days there was little enough to slip. An artist should 
be comfortable, and bills were mundane things. So, 
while no one ever disputed his honesty of intention, 
he was apt to be in trouble. He was often poor and 
knew what privation was. But he never complained, 

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AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

and even when the bailiffs were in his house, he got 
gayety and convenience out of them as much as ever 
Sheridan did. With time as with money. Exact hours 
and art had nothing to do with each other. What was 
punctuality? A virtue — or vice — of the bourgeoisie. 
If people invited him to dinner, he came when he 
pleased and dinner waited. If he invited them to 
breakfast at twelve, they might arrive at one and still 
hear him splashing in his bath behind the folding- 
doors. 8 

In all these varied phases of simplicity and so- 
phistication what strikes me most is a certain child- 
likeness. The child is a naked man, and in many re- 
spects so was Whistler. The child clue accounts for 
many of his oddities and reconciles many of his con- 
tradictions. He thought some strange things; but 
above all, he said and did what he thought, as most of 
us do not. Take his infinite delight in his own work. 
What artist in any line does not feel it? But some 
conceal it more than Whistler. Gazing with rapt adora- 
tion at one of his pictures, he said to Keppel: "Now, 
isn't it beautiful?" "It certainly is," said Keppel. 
And Whistler: "No, but isn't it beautiful?" "It is, 
indeed," said Keppel. And Whistler again, " raising 
his voice to a scream, with a not too wicked blasphemy, 
and bringing his hand down upon his knee with a bang 
so as to give superlative emphasis to the last word of 
his sentence," " it! is n't it beautiful?" 9 

The child is the centre of his own universe, relates 
everything, good and evil, to himself, as does the man 
also in his soul. Whistler did it openly, triumphantly. 

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james McNeill whistler 

His official biographers declare that they never heard 
him refer to himself in the third person; but they knew 
him only in later life and always managed to take a 
comparatively academic and decorous view of him. 
It is impossible to question Mr. Bacher's account of his 
referring to himself as Whistler, though there may be 
some exaggeration in it. Not I, but Whistler, did this 
or that. You must not find fault with the work or with 
the word of Whistler. Or again, it was the Master, as 
Mr. Menpes records it for us. " You do not realize what 
a privilege it is to be able to hand a cheque to the Mas- 
ter. You should offer it on a rich old English salver and 
in a kingly way." 10 A good deal of mockery in it, of 
course, but an appalling deal of seriousness also. And 
note the curious coincidence of this obvious, self-assert- 
ing, third-personal egotism with the attempt of Henry 
Adams to avoid egotism in precisely the same manner. 
Everywhere with Whistler there is the intense deter- 
mination of the child to occupy the centre of the stage, 
no matter who is relegated to the wings. There is the 
sharp, vivid laugh, the screaming "Ha ! Ha !" — a terror 
to his enemies, and something of a terror to his friends 
also. Not a bit of real merriment in it, but a trumpet 
assertion of Whistler's presence and omnipresence. 
There is the extraordinary preoccupation with his own 
physical personality. In some respects no doubt he 
was handsome. A good authority declares that in 
youth he must have been "a pocket Apollo." n At 
any rate, to use his pet word, he was always " amazing." 
The white lock, whether he came by it by inheritance 
or accident, what an ensign it was to blaze out the 

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AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

coming of the Master! Just so Tom Sawyer triumphed 
in his deleted front tooth. Read Mr. Menpes's remark- 
able account of Whistler at the barber's. What a sa- 
cred function, what a solemn rite, the cult of the lock, 
the cult of the Master's personality. At the tailor's it 
was the same. Every customer was called upon to give 
his opinion as to the fit of a coat, and the tailor was 
duly impressed with his almost priestly privilege: 
"You know, you must not let the Master appear badly 
clothed : it is your duty to see that I am well dressed." 12 
What wonder that Mr. Chesterton affirms, though 
unjustly, that "the white lock, the single eye-glass, the 
remarkable hat — these were much dearer to him than 
any nocturnes or arrangements that he ever threw off. 
He could throw off the nocturnes; for some mysterious 
reason he could not throw off the hat." 13 Milton was 
of the opinion that he who would be a great poet must 
make his own life a great poem. Whistler apparently 
thought that he who would be a great artist must make 
himself a great picture; but the picture he made was 
only what he detested most — the word and the thing 
— clever. 

II 

A large feature of the life of children is quarreling. 
It certainly was a large feature of the life of Whistler. 
And we shall best understand his quarrels, if we think 
of him as a noisy, nervous, sharp-tongued, insolent 
boy. There have been plenty of other artists like him, 
alas! He has been compared to Cellini, and justly; and 
Vasari's accounts of Renaissance painters abound with 

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james McNeill whistler 

rough words and silly or cruel deeds that might easily 
have been Whistler's. Byron's aristocratic imperti- 
nences show the same thing in literature, and Heine's 
noble and lovable traits were offset by abuse in the 
temper of a street ragamuffin. 

Whistler liked flattery and adulation as a child does, 
and sought them with the candid subtlety which a child 
employs for the same object, witness the singular story 
of the arts and wiles with which the Master tried to 
win the affection of the ignorant fishermen of Saint 
Ives — without success. 14 

As he liked compliments, so he resented criticism, 
especially if it did not come from a competent source; 
and a competent source was too apt to mean one that 
took Whistler's preeminence for granted. Criticism, 
sometimes reasonable, sometimes ignorant, sometimes 
really ill-natured and spiteful, was at the bottom of 
most of the riotous disagreements which long made the 
artist more conspicuous than his painting did. It is not 
necessary to go into the details of all these unpleas- 
ant squabbles. The names of Ruskin, Wilde, Moore, 
Whistler's brother-in-law, Haden, and his patrons, 
Eden and Leyland, will sufficiently suggest them. 
Sometimes these adventures began with hostility. 
Sometimes friendship began them and hostility ended 
them. Sometimes Whistler appears madly angry, 
actually foaming at the mouth, says one observer, so 
that a fleck of foam was to be seen on his tie. lfi Some- 
times he chuckled and triumphed devilishly, with 
punctuations of the fierce and irritating "Ha! Ha!" 
Sometimes there was physical violence. Once the 

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AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

artist caught an antagonist washing his face in a club 
dressing-room, slipped up behind him, dashed his head 
down into the soapy water, and ran away gleefully, 
leaving the enemy to sputter and swear. 16 Or the 
contest was more furious and more doubtful in out- 
come, as in the rough-and-tumble fights with Haden 
and Moore, in which each side asserted the victory. 
Of course such doings were disgusting and disgraceful, 
no matter how they resulted, and they should have 
been forgotten as speedily as might be. 

But this was not Whistler's way. Instead, he gloated 
over every contest, whether verbal or muscular. He 
insulted his enemies and exalted their discomfiture in 
print, like a hero of Homer or a conceited boy. He 
wrote letter after letter to the papers, always so oblig- 
ingly ready to help a great man expose himself. Then 
he collected the whole mass, including the replies of 
those who had been foolish enough to reply, into "The 
Gentle Art of Making Enemies," and flattered himself 
that he was a great author as well as a great painter. 

Some people think he was. There is no doubt that he 
was a master of bitter words. His phrases have a casual 
ease of snapping and stinging that often scarifies and 
sometimes amazes. From his Puritan training and his 
extensive knowledge of the Bible, "that splendid mine 
of invective" as he characteristically called it, 17 he 
drew a profusion of abuse, which withered, whether 
justifiable or not. And occasionally he was capable of 
great imaginative touches that recall his pictures. 

But in general his writing is vexatious and, to say 
the least, undignified, the angry gabble of a gifted small 

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james McNeill whistler 

boy, who ought to know better. The Wilde corre- 
spondence is perhaps the worst; but everywhere we get 
a tone of cheap railing. There is a careless vigor of 
sharp wit, but hardly the vituperative splendor of 
Voltaire or Swift. And it is such a small, such a shallow, 
such a supersensitive way of taking criticism; no ur- 
banity, no serenity, no large, sweet, humorous accept- 
ance of the inevitable chattering folly of the world. 
I do not see how any admirer of Whistler's positive 
genius can read "The Gentle Art" without sighing 
over the pity of it. 

The pity of it is rather increased by his evident en- 
joyment. There was no real hatred at the bottom of 
his attacks. Mr. Chesterton insists that he tortured 
himself in torturing his enemies. This is rather too 
much of a tragic emphasis. He relieved his nervous 
irritability by slashing right and left. But I do not 
know that there was much torture in it and there was 
a good deal of fun — of a kind. "I have been so abso- 
lutely occupied, what with working and fighting! — 
and you know how I like both." 18 He did like fighting, 
and winning — or to make out that he had won. In a 
charming phrase he describes himself as "delicately 
contentious." 19 Again, he told the Pennells that "he 
could never be ill-natured, only wicked." 20 The dis- 
tinction is worthy of him, and is no doubt just, though 
perhaps not so self-complimentary as he thought it. 

Moreover, in all his fights and quarrels, he liked and 
respected — possibly, as Du Maurier insinuates, 21 — 
a little dreaded — those who stood up to him and an- 
swered back. If you dodged and cowered, he would 

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AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

pursue you remorselessly. If you gave him as good 
as he sent, he would laugh that shrill "Ha! Ha!" and 
let you go. Mark Twain visited him and was looking 
over his pictures. "Oh," cried Whistler, "don't touch 
that! Don't you see, it is n't dry?" "I don't mind," 
said Mark. " I have gloves on." From that moment 
they got along famously. When the artist was painting 
Lady Meux, he vexed and bothered and badgered her 
past endurance. Finally she snapped out, "See here, 
Jimmie Whistler! You keep a civil tongue in that head 
of yours, or I will have in some one to finish those por- 
traits you have made of me." All Whistler could find 
to say was, "How dare you? How dare you?" M 

Also, his impishness, his strange, fantastic love of 
mischief prompted him to scenes and touches of Aristo- 
phanic, Mephistophelian comedy, sometimes laughable 
and sometimes repulsive. There is a Renaissance 
cruelty about his remark, when told that the architect 
who originally designed the Peacock Room had gone 
mad on seeing Whistler's alterations, "To be sure, 
that is the effect I have upon people." 23 There is more 
of the ridiculous, but also much of the bitter, in his own 
wonderful account of his revenging himself upon Sir 
William Eden by spoiling the auction sale of his pic- 
tures: "I walked into the big room. The auctioneer 
was crying 'Going! Going! Thirty shillings! Going!' 
'Ha! Ha!' I laughed — not loudly, not boisterously 
— it was very delicately, very neatly done. But the 
room was electrified. Some of the henchmen were 
there; they grew rigid, afraid to move, afraid to glance 
my way out of the corners of their eyes. 'Twenty 

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james McNeill whistler 

shillings! Going!' the auctioneer would cry. 'Ha! 
Ha!' I would laugh, and things went for nothing and 
the henchmen trembled." u 

Moralizing comment on all these wild dealings and 
doings of Whistler is perhaps superfluous and inap- 
propriate. It would certainly have caused boundless 
glee to W T histler himself. Yet one may be permitted to 
point out how easy it is, after all, to be disagreeable and 
how little real cleverness it requires. Most of us devote 
our best efforts to avoiding instead of achieving it. 
And then how often we fail! Even to be disagreeably 
witty is not always a triumph of genius. Any tongue 
can sting, and the unthinking are always ready enough 
to mistake stinging for wit. Much of Whistler's re- 
corded talk and signed writing irresistibly suggests 
Doctor Johnson's saying about Cibber: " Taking from 
his conversation all that he ought not to have said, he 
was a poor creature." 

It is the same with the gentle art of making enemies. 
Most of us require no art for it, being admirably gifted 
by nature in that direction. The art of making friends 
is the difficult one, especially that of keeping them after 
they are made. It is easy to ridicule friendship. A lady 
once asked Whistler: "Why have you withered people 
and stung them all your life?" He answered: "My 
dear, I will tell you a secret. Early in life I made the 
discovery that I was charming; and if one is delightful, 
one has to thrust the world away to keep from being 
bored to death." 25 And he dedicated "The Gentle 
Art" to "The rare Few, who, early in Life, have rid 
Themselves of the Friendship of the Many." The irony 

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AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

is obvious enough, and it is equally obvious that Whis- 
tler was referring to the casual friendships of the world, 
which do not deserve the name. At the same time, the 
art, or the gift, or the instinct, of drawing men to you 
is worth more, to the artist or the Philistine, than that 
of repelling them. In studying Whistler one cannot 
but think of such an opposite type as Longfellow, who, 
without effort, almost without thought, and still keep- 
ing an individuality as sturdy and more manly than 
Whistler's, made himself lovable and beloved by every- 
body. Or, if Longfellow as an artist is not thought 
worthy the comparison, take Raphael, of whom Vasari 
tells us that a power was "accorded to him by Heaven 
of bringing all who approached his presence into har- 
mony, an effect inconceivably surprising in our calling 
and contrary to the nature of artists." And again, 
" All harsh and evil dispositions became subdued at the 
sight of him; every base thought departing from the 
mind before his influence. . . . And this happened be- 
cause he surpassed all in friendly courtesy as well as in 
art." I am inclined to think that such praise would be 
worth more to Whistler's memory a hundred years 
hence than "The Gentle Art of Making Enemies." 

in 

So, having got rid of the too abundant negative traits, 
let us turn to Whistler's attraction and charm. He was 
a man of contradictions, says Mr. Van Dyke; 26 and 
the frivolous mischief-maker lived side by side with a 
thoughtful, earnest, even lofty-souled artist. 
The child clue will stay with us, as before. Those 

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james McNeill whistler 

who knew Whistler best frequently recur to it: "When 
off his guard, he was often a pathetic kid." 27 The 
childlike candor rarely failed, not only in asserting 
merits, but even in recognizing defects: "He was the 
most absolutely truthful man about himself that I ever 
met. I never knew him to hide an opinion or a thought 
— nor to try to excuse an action." 28 And with the 
candor in professing opinions went a high and energetic 
courage in defending them, a courage that was some- 
times blatant and tactless, but seems to have been 
genuine, even to the point of admitting its own failures. 
When Mr. Menpes said to him, "Of course you don't 
know what fear is?" Whistler answered, "Ah, yes! 
I do. I should hate, for example, to be standing op- 
posite a man who was a better shot than I, far away 
out in the forest in the bleak, cold early morning. 
Fancy I, the Master, standing out in the open as a 
target to be shot at!" 29 

In general human relations it would be a mistake to 
suppose that Whistler was always thorny, prickly, 
biting and stinging. His biographers insist upon his 
gayety. 30 Mr. Chesterton denies that he was gay at all, 
and I think Mr. Chesterton must have been right. 
True gayety not only does not wound, but cannot bear 
the thought of having wounded; and such was not 
Whistler. Though he chose the butterfly emblem, his 
nature had not the butterfly's light and careless satura- 
tion of sunshine. But it is true that he loved human 
society and did not like to be alone, even wanting 
people about him when he worked. He could use his 
wit to charm andfascinate aswell as to punish. When- 

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AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

ever he took part in conversation, he led it and de- 
served to lead it. Hear this account of his appear- 
ance in a crowded club-room: "Speaking simply in 
a quiet way to myself, without once looking round, 
Whistler would draw every man in that club to his 
side — smart young men about town, old fogies, 
retired soldiers, who had been dozing in arm- 
chairs." 31 And men not only listened to him, they 
loved him — when they did not hate him. "Whistler 
could be gentle, sweet, sympathetic, almost feminine, 
so lovable was he." 32 He inspired deep attachments, 
which could be broken only by the rude knocks that 
he too well knew how to give them. He was gentle 
and patient with servants, and there is no better proof 
of simple goodness and kindness. S3 

For women he seems always to have had a peculiar 
regard, though the records of his relations with them 
are naturally not abundant. His Southern training 
and habits gave him a rather unusual formal courtesy 
toward them and many witnesses insist upon what is 
somewhat curious in consideration of his wit and comic 
instinct and his distinctly irregular life, that he never 
uttered and never tolerated grossness. Two attach- 
ments to women, at any rate, played a large part in his 
career. He adored his mother and obeyed her in his 
youth. He adored her and watched over her in his 
riper years. Although he resented any critical sugges- 
tion of sentiment in his portrait of her, he confided to 
a friend, speaking very slowly and softly. "Yes — yes 
— one does like to make one's mummy just as nice as 
possible." 34 When he was over fifty, he stumbled upon 

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james McNeill whistler 

a marriage, fortuitous as most other external events in 
his life; but the marriage was singularly happy; he 
adored his wife as he had his mother, and her death 
shattered him in a way to confute those who denied 
him human tenderness. 

When it comes to art, Whistler's admirable qual- 
ities are questioned by no one. His devotion to it from 
youth to age was perfect and unfailing. It was not 
perhaps so devouring and morbid a passion as with 
some, but it was a constant flame, which burned stead- 
ily through all difficulty and all discouragement. It 
was enlightened and intelligent also, directed from 
the beginning with firm and close discipline toward a 
definite object. Not that the difficulties and discour- 
agements did not come. In spite of his confidence 
and belief in himself, there were times, as with all 
artists, when things went bitterly, hopelessly wrong: 
"No one," says Mr. Gay, "can realize, who has not 
watched Whistler paint, the agony his work gave him. 
I have seen him after a day's struggle with a picture, 
when things did not go, completely collapse, as from 
an illness." 35 And one should read Mr. Menpes's 
strange account of nervous excitement, on the very 
eve of an exhibition, over a mouth that was not right 
and could not be made right: "He became nervous and 
sensitive. The whole exhibition seemed to centre on that 
one mouth. It developed into a nightmare. At length, 
in despair, he dashed it out with turpentine, and fled 
from the gallery just as the first critic was entering." 36 

As these efforts and struggles show, no matter how 
much Whistler may have attitudinized in life, in art 

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AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

he was sincere and genuine. If you took him quietly 
by himself, you could not but feel this. "As a matter 
of fact," says Mr. Van Dyke, "he was almost always 
in a serious mood, and, with his knowledge and gift of 
language, talked most sensibly and persuasively." S7 
His actions showed sincerity far more than his talk. 
Though he was careless about money, spent much of it 
and would have liked to spend more, and believed that 
he could have done better work if he had had more to 
spend, he never sacrificed one line of his ideals for any 
earthly payment. "It is better to live on bread and 
cheese and paint beautiful things than to live like 
Dives and paint pot-boilers," he said; 38 and he meant it 
and acted on it always. 

Also, he was sincere enough to accept criticism and 
profit by it, when it came from a proper source and in 
a proper spirit. He once asked a great sculptor what 
he thought of a portrait. The sculptor, after some hes- 
itation, merely pointed out that one leg was longer 
than the other. Whistler's friends expected an out- 
burst. Instead, he remarked quietly: "You are quite 
right. I had not observed the fault, and I shall cor- 
rect it in the morning." 39 Afterward he added, "What 
an eye for line a sculptor has!" 

And, as he was ready to submit to intelligent crit- 
icism of his own painting, so he was equally quick to 
acknowledge merit in others, provided it was really 
there. He praised the work of students and fellow- 
artists with swift and discerning kindness, if it seemed 
to him praiseworthy. But pretence and shallow clev- 
erness he withered wherever he found them. 

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james McNeill whistler 

His capacity for labor, for continuous and prolonged 
painstaking, was limitless. Because he concealed this 
and pretended to work lightly and casually, people 
thought him idle, but he was not. Industry, he said, 
was an absolute necessity, not a virtue, and a picture, 
when finished, should show no trace of the labor that 
had produced it: "Work alone will efface the foot- 
steps of work." 40 In fact, it was only in age that he 
discovered that he had never done anything but work. 
" It struck me that I had never rested, that I had never 
done nothing, that it was the one thing I needed." 41 
He could not tolerate laziness in himself or in others. 
In his house there were no armchairs, and to a friend 
who complained of this he said, "If you want to rest, 
you had better go to bed." 42 But his friends and pupils 
did not want to rest when he was with them. "Whis- 
tler invariably inspired people to work," says one who 
knew him well. 43 The sittings for his portraits were 
prolonged and repeated, till the sitters' patience was 
utterly exhausted, and some of them complained that 
the intensity of his effort seemed to draw the very life 
out of them. 44 In short, those who judge" him by his 
quarrels and his bickerings and his flippancy and his 
odd clothes get no idea of the deep, conscientious ear- 
nestness of the artist. He worked till death to produce 
beautiful things. A. year before he died, he insisted with 
passionate simplicity and sincerity : " I would have done 
anything for my art." 45 To the end he was looking 
forward and there are few finer expressions of the ar- 
dor of creation than his noble phrase, "an artist's ca- 
reer always begins to-morrow." 46 

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AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

IV 

It is not my business to discuss Whistler's art as 
such. But as the general's soul is revealed in his bat- 
tles and the preacher's in his sermons, so in his pic- 
tures we must seek the painter's, and the biographer 
must consider work as well as words. 

It appears, then, that in Whistler's art there are 
two marked elements which, taken together, help 
largely to elucidate his spirit. The first of these is the 
element of truth, precision, exactitude, showing more 
conspicuously in the etchings, but never neglected in 
any of his work at any time. As he himself said of the 
Thames series of etchings: "There, you see, all is 
sacrificed to exactness of outline." 47 

This instinct of truth, of reality, should be closely 
related to the more external facts of Whistler's life. 
In combination with the childlike simplicity and open- 
ness, it entered largely into his everlasting quarrels. 
He did not quarrel in Paris — that is, not abnormally. 
But all the artist in him, all the truth-lover, revolted 
against the conventions of English Philistinism, and 
he fought them, whether critical or social, with all the 
passion that was in him. "The wit of Whistler . . . was 
the result of intense personal convictions as to the 
lines along which art and life move together," says 
one of his most intelligent biographers. 48 As applied 
to life, this instinct of truth in him was mainly de- 
structive, and did little good to him or others; but it 
was obscurely lofty in aim and it was an integral part 
of his better nature. 

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james McNeill whistler 

In art, on the other hand, the destructive instinct 
led at once to construction. Here, too, indeed, there 
was the perpetual, deadly war on sham. Whistler saw 
all around him, in painting as in poetry, the Victorian 
excess of sentiment. The "heart interest" was what 
counted and execution was a minor matter. The An- 
gelus and "Evangeline" would make a world-wide 
reputation, whether the workmanship was supreme or 
not. Against this heresy of the subject Whistler was 
in perpetual revolt. He did not sufficiently realize 
that a great artist may treat a great subject, though it 
too often happens that to the vulgar eye a great subject 
may transfigure a mean conception and a vulgar hand- 
ling. He wanted to shake art free from all these ad- 
juncts of theme and historical association and his- 
torical development and concentrate the artist's whole 
effort on the pure ecstasy of line and color. He pushed 
this so far as to revel in mere decorative richness, 
feeding and filling his eye and imagination with the 
azure and golden splendors of the Peacock Room. 

But, of course, if you had pushed him home, he 
would have admitted that in the end ail beauty must 
be related to human emotion, vague suggestions and 
intimations of subtle feeling, all the more overpower- 
ing because indefinite. And the real purpose of get- 
ting rid of a distinct, trite subject was to allow these 
essential emotions richer play. Music, in which he so 
often sought analogy, would have given it to him in 
this point also. For the most elaborate orchestral 
symphony depends as fundamentally on human emo- 
tion for its significance as does the simplest air. And 

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AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

Bach and Wagner open realms of feeling equally deep, 
though widely different. The most original and sug- 
gestive part of Whistler's painting, if not the great- 
est, is that which enters most into this vast and un- 
charted region of intangible emotion. Of all things he 
loved to paint night, and what in the wide world is 
more throbbing with imaginative depths? " Subject, 
sentiment, meaning were for him in the night itself — 
the night in its loveliness and mystery." 49 

Here we seize the second cardinal element in Whis- 
tler's work, the element of mystery. What character- 
izes his range of vague emotion is not passion, not mel- 
ancholy, but just the sense of mystery, of the indefin- 
able, the impalpable. It is singular how all the critics, 
whatever their point of view, unite in distinguishing 
this, something vague, something elusive, some hidden, 
subtle suggestion which cannot be analyzed or seized 
in words. It is naturally more marked in the noc- 
turnes and similar paintings, but it is perfectly appre- 
ciable also in the portraits and in the etchings, the 
handling of backgrounds and accessories, the delicate, 
evasive gradation of tints and shades. As Huysmans 
puts it, "these phantom portraits, which seem to shrink 
away, to sink into the wall, with their enigmatic 
eyes." 60 

And note that the two elements must work together 
to produce their full effect. It is the intense impres- 
sion of defmiteness, of clearness, the extraordinary 
realistic emphasis on one salient point, that doubles 
the surrounding suggestion of mystery. In the secret 
of making precision, vivid definition, enhance and re- 

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james McNeill whistler 

double the obscure, Whistler shows his debt to Poe 
in an overwhelming degree. But there is another in- 
fluence that may have affected Whistler in this re- 
gard, and that is Russia. I cannot find that any critic 
or biographer has suggested this. Yet the artist passed 
the most impressionable part of his youth in Russia. 
His eyes, his ears, his heart were wide open all that time. 
Not only Russian painting, but Russian music and 
Russian feeling must have passed into them. He must 
have touched the Orient there as he did later through 
Japan. And surely the essence of Russian art is in 
just this union of intense, bald realism with the most 
subtle, far-reaching suggestion of the unlimited, the 
unexplored, the forever unknown. Russia is childhood 
intensely sophisticated. And so was Whistler. 

It is curious to reflect that the combination in Whist- 
ler of the most lucid, direct, energetic intelligence with 
the complete general ignorance I have noted earlier 
led to exactly this result, of the vivid blending of pre- 
cision with mystery. Clear-sighted and observant as he 
was, there is no sense of modern life in him, no portrayal 
of the quick, active, current movement of the contem- 
porary world, no such portrayal of any world. The intel- 
ligence seems to clarify simply for the purpose of ob- 
scuring. The total result of the age-long development 
of such a magnificent instrument as human reason, 
as Whistler illustrates it, is to stultify itself, to show 
with blinding flashes the boundless region of impen- 
etrable shadow. And in this phase of Whistler's art 
nothing is more symbolical and suggestive than the 
nocturnes with fireworks. The glare of the falling 

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AMERICAN PORTRAITS > 

rocket makes the involving darkness oppress you with 
a negative visibility that is maddening. 

It is in view of this union of intense intellectual 
clearness with mystery that we must read all Whist- 
ler's perplexing remarks about nature. Nature was 
crude multiplicity. To the unseeing eye, to the unaided 
imagination she would not yield her secret or tell her 
story. It was the artist's business and his triumph to 
select, to isolate, to emphasize, to coordinate, so as to 
suggest the emotion he wished to convey, no other and 
no more. Here, again, the parallel of music would have 
illustrated better than any analysis of painting. Every 
sound that music uses is given in nature, but given in 
a vast and tangled disorder which, to a sensitive ear, 
results as often in pain as in pleasure. The musician's 
genius brings this chaos into an ordered scheme of 
harmonized delight. To Whistler's artistic instinct the 
final and perfect triumph of human intelligence was 
the transforming of confusion into mystery. 

Many have been puzzled by Whistler's dislike of the 
country and even abuse of it. The explanation is sim- 
ple. In the first place, he had never lived in the country. 
His experience of it was the tourist's, and nature to the 
tourist is a mere panoramic display, a succession of 
vulgar excitements from an ever higher mountain or 
deeper sea. Nature to the tourist is scenery, not feeling. 
This is what Whistler meant when he returned from a 
visit to the English lakes and said that the mountains 
"were all little round hills with little round trees out of 
a Noah's ark"; 51 when he complained in general that 
there were too many trees in the country, and even 

110 



james McNeill whistler 

grumbled to a friend, who urged the glory of the stars, 
"there's too many of them." 52 If he had grown up 
with an exquisite threshold beauty, such as hovers in 
the lovely lines of Cowper, 

" Scenes that soothed 
Or charmed me young, no longer young, I find 
Still soothing and of power to charm me still," 

his brush would have drawn out the charm as few had 
ever done before. But he dwelt in cities. Huge cas- 
ual doses of nature first surfeited and then starved him. 
Moreover, he held, it may be justly, that the deepest 
fountains of mystery are not even wide fields and quiet 
skies, but the human eye and the human heart. 

It is needless to say that the theory of mystery as I 
have elaborated it — perhaps too subtly — is not ex- 
plicit in any writing or recorded speech of Whistler 
himself. When one has it in mind, however, there is 
a curious interest in catching the notes and echoes of 
it in his own words. Thus, in practical matters, take his 
remark to one who commented on the unfinished con- 
dition of Whistler's dwelling. "You see, I do not care 
for settling down anywhere. Where there is no more 
space for improvement, or dreaming about improve- 
ment, where mystery is in perfect shape, it is finis — the 
end — death. There is no hope, nor outlook left." 5S 
Or take the same instinct in a more artistic con- 
nection. "They talk about the blue skies of Italy, — 
the skies of Italy are not blue, they are black. You do 
not see blue skies except in Holland and here, where 
you get great white clouds, and then the spaces be- 
tween are blue ! and in Holland there is atmosphere, 

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AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

and that means mystery. There is mystery here, too, 
and the people don't want it. What they like is when 
the east wind blows, when you can look across the 
river and count the wires in the canary bird's cage 
on the [other side." 54 Finally, take the wonderful 
words about painting in the twilight, full of mystery 
and vague suggestion as a poem of Shelley: "As the 
light fades and the shadows deepen, all the petty 
and exacting details vanish; everything trivial dis- 
appears, and I see things as they are, in great, strong 
masses; the buttons are lost, but the garment re- 
mains; the garment is lost, but the sitter remains; the 
sitter is lost, but the shadow remains. And that, night 
cannot efface from the painter's imagination." 55 Even 
allowing for the touch of Whistler's natural irony, such a 
view of art seems to amend Gautier's celebrated phrase 
into "I am a man for whom the invisibleworld exists," 
and to give double emphasis to the lines of Keats, 

" Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard 
Are sweeter." 

So we find in Whistler, as we found implicit in Mark 
Twain and Sidney Lanier and explicit in Henry Adams, 
the immense and overwhelming heritage of ignorance 
which the nineteenth century transmitted to the twen- 
tieth. But whereas Mark erected ignorance into a dog- 
matic religion of negation, and Adams trifled with it, 
and Lanier battled with it, Whistler drew out of it the 
enduring solace of artistic effort, and applied to its 
persistent torment the immortal, divine recipe for cure 
of headache, heartache, soul-ills, body-ills, poverty, 
ignominy, contempt, neglect, and pain, the creation, or 
even the attempted creation, of things beautiful. 



V 

JAMES GILLESPIE BLAINE 



CHRONOLOGY 

James Gillespie Blaine. 

Born, West Brownsville, Pennsylvania, 

January 31, 1830. 
Married Harriet Stanwood, June 30, 1850, 
Removed to Maine, 1854. 
Speaker of Maine House of Representatives, 

1861, 1862. 
Elected to Congress, 1862. 
Speaker of the House of Representatives, 

1869-1875. 
Mulligan Investigation, 1876. 
Senator, 1876-1881. 
Secretary of State, 1881. 
Nominated for the Presidency, 1884. 
Secretary of State, 1889-1892. 
Died, January 27, 1893. 




JAMES G. BLAINE 



V 
JAMES GILLESPIE BLAINE 



The best way to get acquainted with Blaine is through 
Mrs. Blaine's delightful letters. In the most natural, 
most intimate fashion she reflects the whole course of 
her distinguished husband's career, by glimpses and, 
as it were, afar off, yet with a vividness of suggestion 
and comprehension that no formal biography can equal. 
And she was a most interesting person herself, a soul 
of intense emotion and sympathy, of keen insight, of 
playful humor, which sometimes, to be sure, developed 
into a pungency of phrase not wholly beneficial to the 
mistress of it. She had no love of notoriety, of great 
station, oh, no! Yet what she does not want, stings 
her, if she misses it; and she writes of Mrs. Cleveland, 
"Feminine Frances is spelt with an 'e.' Think of the 
first lady in the land, who is not your chere mere." l 
She does not pretend to influence her husband, oh, no ! 
Yet the husband declares that "the advice of a sensi- 
ble woman in matters of statecraft is invaluable," 2 
and what charming significance there is in the wife's 
quiet remark, "He loves the confessional and the lay 
sister (me) — why I do not know, as I always shrive 
him out of hand." 3 

Without making any odious comparisons as to the 
male objects, I must say that Mrs. Blaine's letters 

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AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

have enabled me to understand Lady Macbeth better 
than ever before. There is the same mixture of adora- 
tion and fathomless pity, of warm motherly domestic 
comfort and eager stimulus, with which Lady Macbeth 
surveyed, sustained, and prompted her husband's 
lofty, if somewhat checkered, career. To be sure, it is 
difficult to imagine that Lady Macbeth could have 
achieved the following comprehensive eulogy; yet who 
can tell? "Those who know him most, love him best. I 
dare to say that he is the best man I have ever known. 
Do not misunderstand me, I do not say that he is 
the best man that ever lived, but that of all the men 
whom I have thoroughly known, he is the best." 4 Is 
not that a text for meditation through a long summer's 
day? 

It may be fairly said that Blaine's whole life was 
political. Even in his Pennsylvania boyhood whiffs of 
political passion played around him, and his child let- 
ters of the forties show more interest in politics than 
in any other earthly thing. For a short time he taught 
in a blind asylum, and the wicked insinuate that he 
here became an adept in making the blind see whatever 
he wished them to. He married at twenty years of 
age, in 1850. He then went to Maine, to edit a paper, 
and for the next forty years he and politics were united 
so that only death could part them. 

Before losing ourselves in the political vortex, how- 
ever, it will be well to establish thoroughly the general 
elements of the man's character on which his public 
career was built. 

His distinguishing intellectual trait was intense ac- 

116 



JAMES GILLESPIE BLAINE 

tivity. He was a fairly wide and always an acute and 
comprehensive reader. He is said to have read Scott's 
"Napoleon" before he was eight and all Plutarch be- 
fore he was nine. If so, it indicates his natural predi- 
lections. He had a singular power of abstraction in all 
mental labor. He did not require solitude or quiet, 
but could read and write and think with the whole 
domestic hurly-burly going on about him, and liked 
it. He touched all sorts of subjects lightly and vividly, 
with illumination, if not penetration. Mrs. Blaine 
goes w r ith him to an astronomical observatory, and 
when they get home, comments: Mr. Blaine "demon- 
strates astronomically that Mars could not have any 
moons, and with such a scientific aroma that it would 
deceive the very elect, if they did not know that he 
does not know, and knows we know that he does 
not know anything about it." 6 This suggests, what is 
everywhere evident, that, though by no means de- 
ficient in thoughts, Blaine was on all occasions and in 
all connections an ingenious and unfailing master of 
words. It would be libelous to say that words were the 
whole of him. They were not, ever. But they played 
a large part in his life, much larger than he himself 
realized, and most of his writing suggests a splendid 
facility and felicity in words. His letters snap and 
sparkle with them. His "Eulogy" on Garfield, which 
Senator Hoar rather wildly calls, "one of the treas- 
ures of our literature," is at any rate an interesting 
specimen of abundant diction as well as of genuine 
feeling. The two bulky volumes of "Twenty Years in 
Congress" are almost oppressive in a verbal extension 

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AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

which tends to obscure their real shrewdness, common 
sense, and sanity. 

In the same way it is somewhat difficult to get 
through the covering of words to Blaine's real feeling 
about the most serious things. When he writes to his 
son that " there is no success in this life that is not 
founded on virtue and purity, and a religious conse- 
cration of all we have to God," 6 I would not for a mo- 
ment imply that he did not mean it; but it did sound 
well. The utter absence in Mrs. Blame's printed let- 
ters of all religious suggestion, both for him and for 
her, is very noticeable; but with it we must instantly 
place Blaine's own fine reference to "those topics of 
personal religion, concerning which noble natures have 
an unconquerable reserve." 7 It is certain that he was 
zealous in his church membership, taught in Sunday- 
School so as to produce a lasting impression, 8 and 
liked at all times to discuss theology, as to discuss any- 
thing else. But he was intensely occupied with the 
affairs of this world and his daily attitude was quite the 
reverse of that of the old Scotchman whose caustic words 
he enjoyed putting into the mouth of a theological dis- 
putant : " I meddle only with the things o' God which 
I cannot change, rather than with the things o' man 
where I might do harm." 9 

If practical preoccupations somewhat interfered 
with Blaine's religion, they cut him off almost entirely 
from the delight of art and beauty. No doubt he talked 
about these things, but he had not time to feel them. 
When he was first in Europe, he wrote with enthusi- 
asm of a Rubens picture and Mrs. Blaine mentions 

118 



JAMES GILLESPIE BLAINE 

his interest in picture-buying. Yet during their long 
stay in Florence in the eighties it is remarkable that 
her letters, which speak of everything, make no refer- 
ence whatever to the charm of old painting and sculp- 
ture, and in Florence too! Poetry he quoted, but 
neither read nor cared for. One form of art alone 
really took hold of him. He liked to build houses for 
himself and his friends and to set the houses in sur- 
roundings of exquisite natural beauty. Without having 
time to think much of the attractions of the external 
world, it is evident that he felt them. 

For, if he did not care for art, the cause was lack of 
leisure, not lack of feeling; and his sensibility in all 
directions was quick and wide, perhaps profound. Mrs. 
Blaine's account of his emotion when writing the Gar- 
field "Eulogy" is pathetic in the candor of its sym- 
pathy. After depleting two handkerchiefs, his only 
resource was to retire to solitude. 10 Or again, the 
sensibility would manifest itself in keen excitement, in 
turbid restlessness, in the eager desire to go somewhere, 
see somebody, do something. The external man, as 
revealed to the public and to superficial observers, of 
course veiled all this swift impulse under decorous con- 
trol. But Mrs. Blaine saw everything and tells every- 
thing, if you know how to listen to her. 

Health? Blaine in his later years became morbid 
about his health, and at all times, though he was nat- 
urally active and vigorous, a threatening, even fan- 
cied, symptom was enough to distract him from the 
most important preoccupations. Even his children 
rallied him on the subject. "I am sorry Dr. Barker is 

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coming on," writes Emmons, "for I can already see 
father furtively putting new prescriptions in his pocket 
and preparing himself for another conflict with mod- 
ern drugs. Don't let them be alone together for a 
moment." n And Mrs. Blaine is delightful in her re- 
morseless tenderness. Nobody could care more lov- 
ingly for real, or even for imagined ills, than she, but 
she understands their nature and their significance, 
and sets it off with delicate humor. "Your father," she 
says, "who always rises to the occasion of an imaginary 
peril, wisely skipping the real ones." 12 Is it a question 
of a house? "There is a house there, which he thinks 
would build up his health — argument with him irre- 
sistible." 13 Is it a question of an agent? "A very swell- 
looking young man, with dyspepsia powders, which he 
says are the daily food of Aldrich, Hiscock, and other 
great men. I see a generous box of them lying on the 
table." 14 And for all her love and for all her sympathy, 
there are moments when even her patience wavers a 
little. "Himself is surely improving, and were he 
other than the child of genius would probably not know 
there was anything the matter with him." 15 Again: 
" And with these prodigious powers, the chimney corner 
and speculation on his own physical condition are all 
that he allows himself. . . . This is one of the days 
when I am not in sympathy with disease."' 16 

With such extreme sensibility and such proneness to 
imagine good and ill fortune of all kinds, it was to be 
expected that Blaine would be a man of the most mer- 
curial disposition, liable to be unduly depressed or 
exalted. It is fascinating to watch the reflection of 

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JAMES GILLESPIE BLAINE 

this tendency in the unconscious intimate record of his 
best beloved. Who better than she could indicate "an 
abasement of soul and an abandonment of hope, such 
as those only know who have been fed and nurtured on 
political aspirations and convictions"? 17 Again, she 
could suggest with a quiet touch the intense reaction, 
the eager burst of living, that was thrown into the most 
trivial pursuit when mounting spirits put all care and 
doubt behind them: "Two days of coupe, shopping 
(and — shall I say it without danger of being misun- 
derstood? — your Father), reconcile me to home and 
a new departure." 18 While the immediate contrast has 
rarely been better drawn than in her vivid account 
of two morning greetings: "'0 Mother, Mother 
Blaine, I have so much to do, I know not which way 
to turn.' 'Good!' said I. 'Yes,' said he, 'isn't it per- 
fectly splendid?' A very different cry from the '0 
Mother, Mother Blaine, tell me what is the matter 
with me!' which has so often assailed my earliest wak- 
ing ear, and which always makes my very soul die 
within me." 19 

Among the various real and fancied grounds of 
depression, nothing, unless considerations of his own 
health, affected Blaine more than considerations of 
his wife's. When she is ill, even not seriously, he can- 
cels all his political engagements, and remains at her 
bedside, perturbed to excess, and causing more dis- 
comfort than he relieves. " In my room he sat on my 
bed or creaked across the floor from corner to corner 
by the hour, making me feel a guilty wretch to cause 
him so much misery. He is a dear, dear old fellow." * 

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For his family was dear to him as he was to them, and 
no picture of him could be complete which did not show 
his charm and infinite affection in the delightful atmos- 
phere of home. His children he always speaks of with 
thoughtful tenderness and he not only watched over 
them but enjoyed them. Not many busy fathers, how- 
ever loving, could have made and meant the apt reply, 
when asked "How can you write with these children 
here? " " It is because they are here that I can write." 21 
And he could do more than attend to his deepest con- 
cerns in their presence. He could and did do what is 
perhaps even more difficult, take them into his counsels 
and discuss large matters of thought and profound ques- 
tions of state with intimate freedom at his own fire- 
side, thus making it, his biographer says, "the happiest 
fireside in the world." 22 

As for Mrs. Blaine, his tenderness for her is written 
all over his life and hers. It is not to be supposed that 
such high-mettled natures could pass long years together 
entirely without friction. And the husband occasion- 
ally indulges in the chaffing criticism which rather ex- 
presses tenderness than dulls it. " I drove the pair, my 
wife rode; she is not generally driven, but in family 
arrangements she more commonly drives." 23 Or di- 
rectly to her, after describing a swift rush of occupa- 
tions and preoccupations: "Now, was n't this making 
the most of a day? Had it been you, you would have 
sat down and cried." 24 But the depth and perma- 
nence of the tenderness are everywhere felt, even when 
not uttered, and they are manifested by the constant 
need and constant appeal far more than could be done 

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JAMES GILLESPIE BLAINE 

by any power of language. The most exquisite witness 
to them is their reflection in Mrs. Blaine's own letters. 
"So much of life and so much love," she says of her 
family, "do not often go together." 25 And I do not 
know where to find summed up in briefer, more expres- 
sive words the typical attitude of a devoted wife toward 
an affectionate husband than in the following phrase : 
"I miss his unvarying attention, and as constant 
neglect." 26 

When it came to enlarging regard beyond the family 
circle, Blaine, like most busy men with happy homes, 
does not appear to have had any very intimate friends, 
at least in later life. But the list of those who were 
deeply attached to him is long and his unswerving 
loyalty to all of them is unquestioned. As to his general 
social qualities, it is evident that he was born to mix 
with men, to please them, and to succeed with them. 
He liked his fellows; did not like to be alone, but more 
than that, really liked to be with others, and there is 
an important difference between the two instincts. 
Yet, though he enjoyed society and sought it and liked 
to play a prominent part in it, he was always simple 
and natural, always himself. Mrs. Blaine catches this 
inimitably, as usual: "Your Father, with that inde- 
pendence of criticism which makes him so delightful 
and surprising a comrade." 27 He even carried artless 
candor to the point of abstraction, was careless about 
his appearance, careless about his clothes, would sit 
in a merry company entirely lost and absorbed in 
thought. Then he would return to himself, insist that 
he had not been absent, and with incomparable spirit 

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and vivacity make up for any absence by a presence 
that, though never obtrusive, was all-pervading and 
triumphant. 

When we sum up this social attraction in Senator 
Hoar's reference to "the marvelous personal charm of 
his delightful and gracious manners," 28 we are pre- 
pared to understand something of Blaine's prominent 
place in the political life of his time. 

II 

For, whatever else he was, and no matter what his 
achievement in other lines, he was always, by common 
consent, a consummate politician. He could sway great 
masses of men by his personality as few leaders in 
American history have been able to do. "Mr. Blaine 
was certainly the most fascinating man I have ever 
known in politics," says Andrew D. White. "No won- 
der that so many Republicans in all parts of the country 
seemed ready to give their lives to elect him." 29 To 
be sure, he had enemies as well as friend's, and both 
were ardent. "There has probably never been a man 
in our history upon whom so few people looked with 
indifference," says Senator Hoar. "He was born to be 
loved or hated. Nobody occupied a middle ground as 
to him." 30 Yet even his enemies felt it difficult to re- 
sist his charm. On one occasion, when his name was 
mentioned at a great Democratic meeting, the whole 
audience rose in applause. 31 After he had made some 
rather irritating decision as Speaker, one Democrat 
was heard to say privately to another, "Now there's 
Blaine — but, damn him, I do love him." 32 In his later 

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JAMES GILLESPIE BLAINE 

years, when he was campaigning for others rather than 
for himself, he was everywhere received with what 
John Hay called "a fury of affection." 3S 

Something in his appearance must have charmed 
people. As we look at his portraits to-day, it is not quite 
easy to say what this was. Indeed, in some of them 
there is a look about the eyes that repels. But there 
must have been in his manner and bearing a spirit, 
a vivacity, an instant response to all minds and tempers 
that does not get into the portraits. 

At any rate, the charm was there, and was irre- 
sistible; and one x searches curiously to find out the 
causes of it. It was effective with individuals, taken 
singly. And here it seems to lie largely in a subtle and 
instant understanding. Blaine loved to probe men's 
characters. He was immensely attentive to what others 
were saying and thinking and doing. "Your Father, 
whose quick ear catches everything that is said," 
observes his most loving critic. 34 He not only caught 
what was said, but he interpreted it, put two and two 
and ten and ten together, and built men's minds out 
of their common, careless actions. And as he understood, 
so he sympathized, showed others that he thought 
and also felt as they did. One of his old pupils said of 
his early days of teaching that when boys came to 
confess to him, he knew what they had to say before 
they spoke. 35 It was always so. He came among the 
people and stepped right into their lives. "Wherever 
man earns his daily bread by the sweat of his brow, 
there Mr. Blaine enters, and is ever welcome," said 
one of his neighbors. 36 There was some policy in this 

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AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

undoubtedly; but there was also some love. It is im- 
possible to dispute the admirable verdict of his bi- 
ographer, "He had a passion for human happiness." 37 
And it was a real passion, not a whim or fancy: life 
and his political pursuits were to him always a serious 
matter. He had plenty of jesting at his command, 
plenty of easy gayety. But he was never disposed 
to take ambition or success or the achievement of 
great public objects after the fashion of Seward, as an 
exciting game, or a neatly fashioned and highly fin- 
ished work of art. He moved the souls of others be- 
cause their souls and their welfare and their hopes 
moved him. 

Also, he not only understood and felt, but he remem- 
bered, and it is impossible to overestimate the value of 
this gift in dealing with men. He would meet a man 
whom he had not seen for twenty years and recall 
little details of their last interview. He would shake 
hands with the old farmers and remember their white 
horses and the clever trades they made. "How in 
the world did he know I had a sister Mary, who married 
a Jones?" said one fellow, and went and voted for 
him. 38 He professed that the memory was instinctive, 
and when asked, "How can you remember so?" an- 
swered, "How can you help it?" 39 But he knew well 
enough that there was effort and attention in it; and 
attention, as Chesterfield said, is the foundation of 
courtesy. One day a carriage drove up. " I suspect that 
carriage is coming for you," said a friend. "Yes," said 
Blaine, "but that is not the point. The point is that 
there is a man on that front seat whom I have not seen 

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JAMES GILLESPIE BLAINE 

for twenty-seven years, and I have got just two minutes 
and a half to remember his name in." 40 He remem- 
bered it. 

Probably all these things together make what we 
call magnetism. It is interesting to hear Blaine's own 
opinion of this quality, as embodied in some one else. 
"What precisely is meant by magnetism it might be 
difficult to define, but it is undoubtedly true that 
Mr. Burlingame possessed a great reserve of that sub- 
tile, forceful, overwhelming power which the word 
magnetism is used to signify." 41 Few men have pos- 
sessed more of it than Blaine. 

As it attracted individuals, so it appealed to vast 
masses, who never came into direct contact with him 
at all. He was not a great orator. But he never said 
too much and what he did say, told. He was wonder- 
fully quick at retort, rarely let a critic or questioner 
get the best of him. He was energetic and straight- 
forward. His reputation in politics leads you to ex- 
pect rhetoric in his speeches. But it is not there, or 
rarely. Instead, there is quick and telling common sense. 
And he was simple, spontaneous, appeared to speak 
and did speak direct from the heart, often with imme- 
diate and profound emotion. For it is characteristic of 
the man, and accounts for much of his success, that he 
combined impulse and passion with a singular degree 
of far-reaching foresight and control. 

It was this divination and foresight, even more than 
his gift of speech, that enabled him to hold and guide 
the masses. He was a natural leader; not merely in the 
organizing sense, for he often left organizing to others; 

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but, as Senator Hoar says, he touched the people be- 
cause he was like the people. 42 He saw and foresaw 
the issues that would animate and the right moment 
for introducing them; and he knew how to give them 
the form that clutched men's hearts. 

No man has ever understood better the value as 
well as the defects of the American party system. 
His friends and his enemies were usually those of his 
party. He may perhaps have been inclined to favor 
and reward the former unduly, and it cannot be de- 
nied that he sometimes fell into extremes of parti- 
san and personal bitterness of the sort that drove his 
wife to exclaim, "I hate to hate, but I am in dan- 
ger of that feeling now." 43 But for the most part 
ibis grudges were laid aside as readily as they were 
adopted and he viewed political machinery merely as 
a superb agency to accomplish a particular end. 

His standing as a politician, then, no one can dis- 
pute. Moreover, it is universally admitted that he 
was a remarkably quick, effective, and, on the whole, 
fair presiding officer, in the legislature and in Congress. 
Was he a great statesman? On one side of statesman- 
ship, that of slow, careful, matured, solid construc- 
tion, he seems to have accomplished little. His name 
is widely identified with a protective tariff and he 
spoke and worked for it all his life; but he was not 
connected with any actual tariff measure, unless the 
reciprocity element in the McKinley Bill. As secretary 
of state in 1881 and again, under Harrison, from 1889 
to 1892, he dealt with various large questions of di- 
plomacy. His action was always clear, incisive, and 

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JAMES GILLESPIE BLAINE 

vigorous. His logic was usually reasonable and his 
aims patriotic. But one of his most judicious advo- 
cates speaks of his "failure in tact as a diplomatist" 
and admits that he was a little too prone to carry the 
methods of congressional debate into the sedater sphere 
of diplomacy. u And General Sherman, a connection 
and warm friend, says, referring to his executive abil- 
ity, "His qualities are literary, not administrative. 
... I would not choose Blaine to command a reg- 
iment or frigate in battle. Many an inferior man would 
do this better than he." 45 

On the other hand, in what may be called the imag- 
inative side of statesmanship, Blaine was admirable. 
His mind lived in and with large ideas. He looked for- 
ward, far forward, as Seward did, and built ample, 
confident projects in the days to come. His discus- 
sions of difficult questions were almost always sane, 
simple, reasonable. Take, for instance, his speech on 
the Irish problem, at Portland, in 1886. The subject 
was as thorny then as it is to-day, and I do not know who 
has handled it with more discretion, moderation, and 
true wisdom than Blaine did. An even larger and more 
important matter was the question of Pan-America. 
Blaine's conception of this was far in advance of his 
own time, and his treatment of it, both in planning 
the Peace Congress and afterwards in guiding it, was 
enlightened and enlightening. I do not know what can 
be added to Mr. Root's admirable remark that Blaine 
had "that imagination which enlarges the historian's 
understanding of the past into the statesman's com- 
prehension of the future." 46 

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AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

On the whole, most persons not blinded by party 
prejudice will to-day, I think, agree with Senator 
Hoar that Blaine would have made a satisfactory pres- 
ident, unless as they take exception to his financial 
career. 

in 

From his youth Blaine had a natural taste for busi- 
ness and the world of money. None of his biographers 
elucidates very thoroughly the transition from the poor 
teacher to the comfortably situated, if not wealthy, 
editor who at an early age threw himself into politics. 
But it is evident that at all times he had an instinct 
for speculative investments, liked the excitement of 
them, and needed the money. Also, in business as in 
politics, his taste was rather for large conception than 
for the slow and methodical handling of detail. One 
of Mrs. Blaine's delightful sentences tells, or suggests, 
all we need to know on this head (italics mine): 
"My dearer self — and certainly he might apply the 
title with another significance to me — is looking up 
his sadly neglected stocks — All that fine Fortunatus's 
purse which we once held the strings of, and in which 
we had only to insert the finger to pay therewith for 
the house, has melted from the grasp which too carelessly 
held it" 47 

And the money melted not only from careless man- 
agement, but from direct expenditure. Blaine was 
always ready to give, always charitable. No appeal 
was made to him in vain. Hear another of Mrs. Blaine's 
quick comments on charity and business: "Father had 

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JAMES GILLESPIE BLAINE 

made up his mind this morning to give five hundred 
dollars to the Old Ladies' Home, and it looks like a 
slap in the face from Providence to find things going 
the wrong way in the afternoon." 48 Naturally the 
outgo for personal living was not less in proportion. 
Mrs. Blaine managed as best she could; but to bring 
up six children in the expensive atmosphere of Wash- 
ington cost money, and it was impossible to elude the 
fact or to forget it. 

The pressure, the financial stringency, are every- 
where evident. Mrs. Blaine's inimitable candor 
pushes through all her sense of decorum. "A great 
family are we, so far as the circulation of money is con- 
cerned. To-night we are very nearly square with the 
world." 49 Again, with as near to a reflection upon 
"the best man she ever knew thoroughly" as she can 
permit herself: "I have drawn so much money this 
month, how can any one who never listens to or enters 
into a detail, understand it?" 50 And Blaine's own 
dry, vivid echo fully confirms her distresses: "I do not 
really know which way to turn for relief, I am so pressed 
and hampered. . . . Personally and pecuniarily, I am 
laboring under the most fearful embarrassments." 51 
To which he adds elsewhere this telling figure: "If I 
had the money myself, I would be glad to advance it 
to you, but I am as dry as a contribution-box." 52 

Of course this was not a constant condition. Things 
looked up as well as down. But money poured out, 
was always needed, and, as is the inconvenient nature 
of money, it had to come from somewhere. During 
the later sixties, both before and after he was estab- 

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AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

lished in Congress, Blaine became involved in com- 
plicated financial transactions with a certain Warren 
Fisher, Jr., with whom he had become acquainted when 
Fisher was connected with Blaine's brother-in-law. 
At Fisher's instance Blaine agreed to dispose of a large 
amount of first-mortgage bonds of the Little Rock and 
Fort Smith Railroad to his friends in Maine. The bonds 
normally carried with them to the purchaser a con- 
siderable amount of land-grant bonds and stock; 
but in this case these, together with other first-mort- 
gage bonds, were to go — privately — to Blaine as a 
commission. This transaction in itself appears far from 
creditable, but Blaine doubtless held that he was con- 
ferring a favor and deserved to be remunerated for 
his time and trouble. The investment did not turn 
out successfully. The Little Rock bonds fell, and Blaine 
felt himself obliged in honor — and policy — to pro- 
tect his friends. About this time a considerable number 
of Little Rock bonds were sold to the Atlantic and 
Pacific and to the Union Pacific roads at a price 
largely in advance of the market. It was never shown 
that these bonds came from Blaine and he was able to 
advance specific evidence to the contrary. But much 
suspicion attached to him and in the minds of many it 
was never thoroughly removed. Also, there were other 
dealings with Fisher, more or less unsavory. 

The implication through it all, of course, was that 
Blaine was trading on his great office as speaker of the 
House of Representatives and his opportunity to 
favor the railroads. No corrupt act was ever directly 
and clearly proved against him. But various passages 

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JAMES GILLESPIE BLAINE 

in his letters to Fisher seemed to make the charge 
plausible. Shortly before taking the Little Rock bonds, 
Blaine had made a ruling in the House, of importance 
to the road. In a letter, written some time later, he 
points out that, while doing his plain duty, he had con- 
ferred on his new associates a considerable benefit. 58 
In another letter, of earlier date, he observes, "I do 
not feel that I shall prove a deadhead in the enterprise, 
if I once embark in it. I see various channels in which 
I know I can be useful." 54 These phrases are certainly 
not conclusive; but they are damaging. They are not 
made less so by a sentence in one of Fisher's letters to 
Blaine: "Owing to your political position, you were 
able to work off all your bonds at a very high price; 
and the fact is well known to others as well as myself." 55 
This charge Blaine received almost cringingly and with 
no denial whatever. 

From the time when the unpleasant matter was first 
stirred up, not long before the presidential nomina- 
tion of 1876, Blaine's course about it was thoroughly 
unsatisfactory. He made well-sounding speeches in 
the House, which convinced all those who were con- 
vinced already. But to any careful scrutiny it was ev- 
ident that he shuffled and prevaricated, contradicted 
himself, and used every effort to conceal what in the 
end could not be concealed. He declared publicly that 
the very attempt to cover up an action condemns it; 
yet he urged upon Fisher the closest secrecy. "Burn 
this letter," or words to that effect, was a common 
phrase with him. 66 It was perhaps a natural one, but 
it fitted the Fisher letters too well. In the crisis of 

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his difficulties he wrote to Fisher enclosing a letter 
which Fisher was to write to him, exonerating him from 
all blame. The document is more ingenious than in- 
genuous, and it is not pleasant to see a man in such a 
situation dictating about himself a sentence like the 
following: "When the original enterprise failed, I knew 
with what severity the pecuniary loss fell upon you, 
and with what integrity and nerve you met it." 67 

The reader will ask curiously how all these very pri- 
vate letters of Blaine's came into the evidence. The 
answer involves not the least disagreeable part of the 
whole affair. The congressional committee, which in- 
vestigated the matter in the spring of 1876, called be- 
fore it one Mulligan, who had been in the employ of 
Fisher. Mulligan had possession of the Blaine corre- 
spondence and proposed to produce it. This annoyed 
Blaine greatly. He had an interview with Mulligan 
and, according to the latter, entreated him to return 
the letters, resorting to suggestions of bribery and to 
threats of suicide. All this Blaine insisted was utterly 
false. What is indisputable is that he got the letters into 
his hands, with at least the implied promise to restore 
them, and then calmly put them in his pocket and 
walked off with them, urging that they were his own 
private property. 

As a climax of the Mulligan business, Blaine read 
the letters in the House in the order and with the com- 
ments that suited him. He ended his speech charac- 
teristically by turning on the investigating committee 
and accusing them of suppressing, for partisan pur- 
poses, evidence that they knew would completely clear 

134 



JAMES GILLESPIE BLAINE 

him. The attack was unjustified and, with Blaine's 
knowledge of the facts, discreditable; but for the mo- 
ment it was immensely telling, and shortly after, as a 
consequence of the sudden illness which helped to pre- 
vent Blaine from being nominated, the immediate 
investigation was dropped. The infection of it, how- 
ever, tainted his whole career. 

What interests us far more than what Blaine ac- 
tually did is his own attitude toward his own actions. 
We may assume with entire confidence that he did not 
for a moment admit to himself that he had done any- 
thing wrong. We have not only Mrs. Blaine's partic- 
ular, triumphant, if perhaps somewhat prejudiced, 
assertion that he was the best man she ever knew thor- 
oughly, but we have the general facts of human nature. 
An acute observer tells us that "One has always the 
support of one's conscience, even when one commits 
the worst infamies. In fact, that is precisely what en- 
ables us to commit them." The dullest of human spir- 
its is inexhaustible in finding excuses for its own con- 
duct, and Blaine, far from being the dullest, was one 
of the most brilliant. 

Therefore I believe he was perfectly sincere when he 
declared upon the floor of the House, "I have never 
done anything in my public career for which I could be 
put to the faintest blush in any presence, or for which 
I cannot answer to my constituents, my conscience, 
and the great Searcher of Hearts." 58 These are tre- 
mendous phrases. Perhaps no living man could utter 
them with entire honesty, and they show the fatal, 
delusive power of words, for their master — and their 

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AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

victim. Yet I have no doubt Blaine meant them. 
Beyond question he meant the far more impressive 
words, spoken in privacy, with obviously genuine 
emotion: "When I think — when I think — that there 
lives in this broad land one single human being who 
doubts my integrity, I would rather have stayed — " 59 
There he stopped, but his gesture showed his ear- 
nestness. 

It is intensely curious to turn from these statements 
to the pamphlet issued in 1884 by the Committee of One 
Hundred and see the explicit analysis of what appear to 
be Blaine's six deliberate falsehoods. The thoughtful 
reader, who has a human heart himself, will manage 
to divine how Blaine explained each one of these. But 
it required a considerable amount of ingenuity. 

Unquestionably he even excused to himself the com- 
plicated course of shuffling and concealment by which 
he endeavored to hide all his proceedings from the 
beginning. These were his own private concerns, he 
argued, long past and buried. The public had not 
conceivable business with them and he was perfectly 
justified in making every possible effort to put the 
public off the scent. 

Yet, as we look back at the affair, this seems to have 
been his worst mistake. If at the very start he had come 
out with perfect candor, told the story of the whole 
transaction, even in its most unfortunate features, 
admitted that he had blundered and had been foolish 
as well as apparently culpable, he might have stormed 
the country. For the American people and all humanity 
love nothing better than a man who acknowledges his 

136 



JAMES GILLESPIE BLAINE t 

faults, and this is the hardest of all lessons for a poli- 
tician to learn. Blaine never learned it. 

As to the business morality of what he did, it is of 
course difficult to pass a complete judgment on it, 
because we never shall know all the facts. But it must 
be remembered that in the late sixties speculation in 
railroads was a mania that affected most business men 
more or less. Lowell, who was by no means friendly to 
Blaine, wrote: "I suspect that few of our Boston men 
who have had to do with Western railways have been 
more scrupulous." 60 Further, it must especially be 
remembered that in all his long career after 1872 no 
suspicion of anything corrupt really attached to Blaine, 
although he was always interested in speculative in- 
vestments. Moreover, the bitter partisan animosity 
that was aroused against him must always be taken 
into account. The most honest of the Mugwumps did 
not hesitate to exaggerate well-grounded suspicion into 
fantastic prejudice. Even Mr. Rhodes, sanest and 
most patient of judges, who in his eighth volume is, 
I think, somewhat too favorable to Blaine's states- 
manship, speaks in volume seven of his "itching 
palm." 61 Now Blaine's palm never itched with greed. 
It was only slippery with liberality. 

Blaine's fundamental error was when, as a great 
political officer of the government, he engaged in dubi- 
ous speculation. Senator Hoar, who admires him and 
exonerates him from all wrong-doing, yet insists that 
"members of legislative bodies, especially great polit- 
ical leaders of large influence, ought to be careful to 
keep a thousand miles off from relations which may 

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AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

give rise to even a suspicion of wrong." 62 Blaine was 
squarely in the midst of such things and not any 
miles off at all. His biographer tells us that one of his 
favorite maxims was, "Nothing is so weakening as 
regret." 63 He regretted his dealings with Fisher, how- 
ever, and spoke of them as "this most unfortunate 
transaction of my life, pecuniarily and otherwise." 6i 
He had reason to, for they cost him the presidency. 

rv 

And the presidency may justly be regarded as the 
goal of his existence. There has been much argument 
about his own personal ambition. The biographers do 
not emphasize this element in him, but rather insist 
that, especially in later years, he became utterly in- 
different to political advancement and so, repeatedly, 
expressed himself. No doubt he did so express himself. 
No doubt, after his defeat in 1884, he behaved with the 
utmost dignity in avoiding any insistent appeal for 
popular favor and in declining to have his name tossed 
about like a straw in the gusts of partisan debate. 
But those who stress this attitude too much forget that 
an imaginative man may perfectly well combine a pas- 
sionate desire for a thing with a philosophical sense of 
its worthlessness. All through Blaine's career I catch 
gleams of intense ambition, like the brief reference to 
the Representatives' Hall in Maine: "That was the 
theatre of a great deal of early pride and power to the 
undersigned. It never covered the horizon of my hopes 
and ambitions, but while in it and of it I worked as 
though there was no other theatre of action in the 

138 



JAMES GILLESPIE BLAINE 

world." 65 And when I read Mrs. Blaine's admirable 
sentence, written in 1881, "Your Father said to me 
only yesterday, 'I am just like Jamie — when I want a 
thing, I want it dreadfully.' " 66 I have no difficulty 
in understanding Mr. Stan wood's picture of him, after 
he had resigned his secretaryship of state in 1892, 
shutting himself up in a Boston hotel, to follow 
with passionate eagerness the reports of the Conven- 
tion where his chance of touching the climax of his 
fate was slipping away forever. 67 

For, no matter what view one takes of Blaine's con- 
scious, personal ambition, it cannot be denied that 
the total logic of his career bore him toward the pres- 
idency with a tremendous, long, unceasing sweep. He 
rose upward and onward through the course of state 
politics, through the larger world at Washington, suc- 
ceeding everywhere and in everything, gaining friends 
and supporters and admirers. It seemed in 1876 as 
if the nomination must be his. Then the phantom of 
the fatal Fisher stalked in and thrust him out. It was 
the same in 1880. When 1884 came, the pressure of 
his immense popularity was too great to be resisted 
and the convention was forced to nominate him. The 
campaign that followed was one of the fiercest, the 
most exciting, the most personal in American history. 
It was also one of the closest. To the end no one could 
tell or foretell. The incident of the over-zealous Rev- 
erend Burchard, who declared that his adored Blaine 
was the deadly enemy of "Rum, Romanism, and Re- 
bellion," may have affected only a few votes. But a 
few in New York were enough, so few that some con- 

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AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

tended that a dishonest count in a district here and 
there was sufficient to change the result. Yet, if it 
had not been for the defection of those who dis- 
trusted Blaine's financial character, a dozen Burchards 
could hardly have made a ripple on the wave of his 
immense majority. 

Unfortunately we have little light on Blaine's in- 
ner life during the contest. Almost his last public 
words before the vote were, " I go to my home to-mor- 
row, not without a strong confidence in the result of the 
ballot, but with a heart that shall not in the least de- 
gree be troubled by any verdict that may be returned 
by the American people." 68 The shall is fine. But 
how such words wither before the vivid humanity of 
Mrs. Blaine's description: "It is all a horror to me. 
I was absolutely certain of the election, as I had a 
right to be from Mr. Elkins's assertions. Then the fluc- 
tuations were so trying to the nerves. It is easy to bear 
now, but the click-click of the telegraph, the shouting 
through the telephone in response to its never-to-be- 
satisfied demand, and the unceasing murmur of men's 
voices, coming up through the night to my room, will 
never go out of my memory — while over and above 
all, the perspiration and chills, into which the con- 
flicting reports constantly threw the physical part of 
one, body and soul alike rebelling against the re- 
straints of nature, made an experience not to be volun- 
tarily recalled." 69 

There is nothing to be said after that. For Blaine 
it was the end, though the end lasted for nearly ten 
years of lingering and superficially varied activity. 

140 



JAMES GILLESPIE BLAINE 

After the bitterness of such an hour, what was there in 
life? You might preserve a decent outside, of courage, 
of dignity, of serenity, even of ardor and enthusiasm. 
Underneath there was nothing. You could nurse your 
pet symptoms of disease, you could turn an honest 
dollar in the stock market, you could trifle afar off 
and with no indecent coquetry with the presidential 
bauble, you could be a paltry secretary of state with 
much credit and some friction, you could see those you 
loved best dying about you, and, thank God, you 
could die yourself. 

Such was the great moral tragedy of James Gil- 
lespie Blaine. With pretty much all the virtues, all 
the graces, all the gifts of genius, he will be remem- 
bered in his country's annals as the man who lost the 
presidency because he was suspected of financial dis- 
honor. 



VI 

GROVER CLEVELAND 



CHRONOLOGY 

Stephen Grover Cleveland. 

Born, Caldwell, New Jersey, March 18, 1837. 

Clerk in grocery-store, Fayetteville, New York, 

1851. 
Removed to Buffalo, New York, 1854. 
Admitted to the bar, May, 1859. 
Elected Mayor of Buffalo, 1881. 
Elected Governor of New York, 1882. 
Elected President of the United States, 1884. 
Married Frances Folsom, June 2, 1886. 
Elected President of the United States, 1892. 
Died, Princeton, New Jersey, June 24, 1908. 




GROVER CLEVELAND 



VI 
GROVER CLEVELAND 



What a comfort it is to find a statesman who did 
not succeed Dy his tongue! No doubt many statesmen 
have admirable qualities that go a little deeper; but 
there are so few for whom the tongue does not open 
the way that gives the other qualities a chance! It 
was not the tongue with Cleveland, at any rate. What 
was it? Some say, or used to say, largely a curious con- 
catenation of favorable circumstances. But this ex- 
plains nothing, and a careful study of his character 
and life will make it appear otherwise. 

The astounding rapidity of Cleveland's advance in 
the world does seem to favor the theory of accident. 
The son of a poor country minister, he had to make 
his way, and made it. He began to earn his living as 
a boy in a grocery-store, in Fayetteville, New York. 
Oddly enough, like his great rival, Blaine, he later held 
a position in a blind asylum. Afterwards he found en- 
trance into a lawyer's office and by immense indus- 
try gradually established a solid practice. He was dis- 
trict attorney and sheriff of Erie County, but not ex- 
ceptionally active or prominent in politics. Then, in 
1881, at the age of forty-four, he became mayor of 
Buffalo, in 1882 governor of New York, in 1884 pres- 
ident of the United States, in 1892 president for a sec- 

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AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

ond term. Is it strange that when he was first in the 
White House he should have said, "Sometimes I wake 
at night and rub my eyes and wonder if it is not all a 
dream?" l 

How far was personal ambition a driving force in 
this extraordinary progress? If you will listen to 
Cleveland's eulogists, you will think it was mainly 
absent. Accoiding to them it would appear that great 
office called for such a man as he was and he complied 
with the demand much against his good nature. It 
needs but little knowledge of the human heart to find 
this view somewhat exaggerated. Men may distrust 
their own ability. They may weary of public cares and 
burdens. But few men have high dignity actually 
thrust upon them. I have no doubt that Cleveland 
liked to be governor, liked to be president, especially 
relished all his life the grandeur of having filled those 
offices. 

This does not mean that there was any untruth in 
his statement that " I never sought an office of any kind 
in my life." 2 It does not mean that he would have 
sacrificed one grain of self-respect to gain any office. 
As dignities came to him, he accepted and enjoyed the 
honor of them; but what they brought chiefly was duty. 
He set himself earnestly, strenuously to fulfil that duty, 
and the task was so absorbing that he hardly perceived 
the necessary result of such fulfilment in another step 
outward and upward. When the presidential nomi- 
nation came to him in 1884, he was occupied with his 
gubernatorial duties at Albany. Naturally he had di- 
vined what was coming, or others had obligingly divined 

146 



GROVER CLEVELAND 

it for him. But neither the nomination nor the cam- 
paign distracted him for a moment from his regular 
work. He stayed in his office and let others do the talk- 
ing, or, if they talked too loudly around him, he went 
off for a day's fishing and forgot them. The campaign 
was ugly, saturated with abuse and scandal. He paid no 
attention. Tell the truth, he urged, and take the con- 
sequences. He appeared so little before the campaign- 
ing crowds that the sight of a great, surging, triumphant 
assembly was nearly too much for him. In an almost 
broken voice he said: "I never before realized what was 
expressed in the phrase 'a sea of faces' — look at it; 
as beautiful and yet as terrible as the waves of the 
ocean." s 

The honest earnestness of his attitude through it all 
shows in nothing better than in his way of receiving the 
news of his nomination. As he sat working in his office, 
firing was heard outside. "They are firing a salute, 
Governor, over your nomination," said General Farns- 
worth. "That 's what it means," added Colonel Lamont. 
"Do you think so?" said the governor quietly. "Well," 
he continued, "anyhow, we'll finish up this work." 4 
That was the man. Whatever happens, life or death, 
we '11 finish up this work. 

II 

With so much work and so little talk, it was natural 
that the country should not have known a great deal 
about the man it had elected president. It never did know 
him. It has only begun to know him since his death. Even 
to-day it is difficult to penetrate beneath the apparent 

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AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

stolidity, the calm, unshaken, impersonal reserve, to the 
warm, human soul. And we have no such charming, 
indiscreet confidences as lurk and linger in the letters 
of Mrs. Blaine. But there was a human soul there, 
just the same. 

There was intelligence, solid, substantial, reliable, if 
not broad. Early opportunities of education there had 
not been. The fierce necessities of bread and butter 
cut them off, and they were always deeply, perhaps 
excessively, regretted. There are some evidences of des- 
ultory reading, for instance a rather surprising reference 
to Sterne, 6 and an out-of-the-way quotation from "Troi- 
lus and Cressida." 6 But in the main large culture was 
not the foundation of Cleveland's thought or life. 

Nor was the lack of cultivation supplemented, as so 
often, by quickness or alertness of intelligence. Some 
men appear learned, and even are learned, by seizing 
the end of a thread here, another there, and patching all 
together into a respectable fabric of wide conversance. 
This process was foreign to Cleveland's nature. He 
did not generalize, did not move readily and swiftly 
among abstract ideas, did not spring instantly to the 
far-reaching significance of the immediate. It is true, 
we have a most interesting saying of his; " I can never 
understand the meaning of any theory until I know 
how it happened." 7 But this implied apparently rather 
the lawyer's close and curious search for precedent than 
the scientist's ample reach into the infinite relations of 
things. 

On the other hand, if the intelligence was not swift 
or restless, it was vigorous, thorough, and exact. Once 

148 



GROVER CLEVELAND 

a problem was fairly stated, it had to be solved, and it 
had to be solved rightly. I cannot make this clearer than 
by quoting a most discerning account of Cleveland's 
methods in conversation, which were evidently his 
methods in all intellectual activity. "At first there was 
a gradual approach to the question from one side, and 
then, perhaps after a little pause, unexpectedly from an- 
other. He was exploring, looking around, feeling his 
way, searching for the general dimensions. He literally 
'went around' the subject carefully and cautiously, and 
on all sides. And if some part necessary to its complete- 
ness was lacking, he made a note of it, and took it into 
account all the way to the end of his discourse. When 
he had made his tour around the subject, as could be 
noticed by a penetrating word here or a phrase of dis- 
covery there, his work was almost done, and with one 
step he went straight to the centre of the complex 
question. And then he was done, and the talk was 
ended." 8 

A great deal has been said about Cleveland's manner of 
writing. It is interesting to us because it is thoroughly 
significant of the man and of his intellectual quality. 
It is formal, elaborate, almost artificially literary, and 
people are surprised that a nature so simple, in some re- 
spects so primitive, should adopt such conventional ex- 
pression. They do not see that it is precisely because 
he was simple, reserved, an actor not a talker, that his 
effort in words was labored and far-fetched. Perfect 
simplicity and directness of form come naturally to those 
to whom words are an inborn gift. Those who deal by 
instinct with deeds, when they do talk, are apt to talk 

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AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

ponderously. Yet when Cleveland put the hammer of 
his character behind his words, they beat themselves 
into the memory of the nation, and few presidents have 
supplied history with more phrases that are remem- 
bered. 

Cleveland's general intellectual qualities are admi- 
rably illustrated in his spiritual and religious attitude. 
The metaphysics of religion had no attraction for him. 
He did not care to discuss speculative theology; and 
so-called higher criticism, with its fine-spun analyses 
and subtle interpretation of scripture, was extremely 
distasteful to his practical bent. He had a certain fine, 
large, human tolerance, well shown in his excellent 
story of the Old Baptist whom his Presbyterian friends 
tried to get into their church: "No; you folks are Pres- 
byterians, and if I go over to your church I could n't 
enjoy my mind." 9 He liked to enjoy his own mind and 
to let others enjoy theirs. Nevertheless, his personal re- 
ligion was essentially conservative. What his father had 
preached and his mother had practised was all he needed. 
"The Bible is good enough for me," he said; "just the 
old book under which I was brought up. I do not want 
notes, or criticisms, or explanations about authorship 
or origin, or even cross-references. I do not need or 
understand them, and they confuse me." 10 

It is true that, like other human beings, he did not 
always practise asjhe preached. There were irregu- 
larities in his earlier life of a sort to scandalize his 
mother. And his summer church attendance was 
not quite what his father would have approved. But 
if he did not always go to church, he rigidly respected 

150 



GROVER CLEVELAND 

the Sabbath. And he had all his life a fineness of con- 
science rather notable in a man of such wide experience of 
the world and so practical a temper. When he was offered 
a considerable sum for a magazine article, he refused to 
take so much because he had accepted less for a similar 
contribution. n Again, he writes to a friend that he has 
declined an offer of a position "to which was attached 
a very large salary, because I did not think I could do all 
the situation demanded and make the project a suc- 
cess." 12 Still more striking is the account of his remorse 
over a possible misstatement in connection with a fishing 
adventure. Long after the incident occurred, he spoke 
of it with obvious distress and when told that with the 
circumstances as they were, his story must have been 
exact, he assented doubtfully : " I hope so, I hope so." 13 
It is evident that the aesthetic element of religion 
would not have had much appeal for Cleveland. And 
in purely aesthetic matters he was even less responsive. 
It is interesting and curious to think that a man who 
had such a vast influence and held such a prominent 
position should have been utterly cut off from emotional 
pleasures which mean the sweet of life to so many people. 
Of course this is not peculiar to him. Still, few even 
practical men are more completely indifferent to the at- 
traction of art and beauty. Of painting, of music, he 
seems to have known little or nothing. He liked the old 
hymns and had learned many of them by heart. In 
the illness of his later years he read many novels. But 
he went to his grave, as do millions of others, less prom- 
inent, with no consciousness whatever of what great 
art is and does for us. 

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AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

To the beauty of nature he was much more sus- 
ceptible, and Mr. West has admirably preserved the 
account of one experience which must have been rep- 
resentative of hundreds. " I can't find a word for it," 
he said quietly . . . after a flood of sunshine had burst 
through a light April shower. "What makes it so beau- 
tiful? There is no word good enough. 'Ravishing' 
comes nearest, I think. Where does it come from? 
Do you know what I mean? It is too good for us. Do 
you understand me? It is something we don't de- 
serve." 14 

The dumb but pervading sense of such natural beauty 
is bound up with what was always one of the greatest 
delights of Cleveland's life, outdoor sport. He was an 
ardent fisherman and hunter. His little book of fish- 
ing sketches brings one right close to him, brings one 
right inside the garment of formal, conventional reserve 
more than anything else possibly could. You seem to be 
spending days of large, quiet pleasure with him, in the 
woods and on the water, to be hearing his quaint sto- 
ries and shrewd comments, and entering into feelings 
that he never showed to congressmen or reporters. 
The very effort and simple artifice of the expression 
reveal a simple nature doing its best to make refrac- 
tory words convey what it seeks to utter and cannot. 
Under the calm, controlled surface you divine latent 
possibilities of excitement which could be aroused by 
keen sport as well as by human rivalry. There is temper 
there, there is depression there and discouragement, 
there is intense enthusiasm. There is the suggestion 
of imaginative range, also, though it is instantly checked 

152 



GROVER CLEVELAND 

by gentle irony. "The keen delights of imagination 
which should be the cheering concomitants of the most 
reputable grade of duck-hunting." 15 

It is characteristic of Cleveland's conservative temper 
that his passion for sport was not modified into any of 
the later nineteenth-century equivalents. It was sim- 
ply the hearty, out-of-doors expression of full-blooded 
health and vigor. There is no sign of the slightest 
scientific curiosity connected with it. There is no pre- 
tentious humanitarianism. The object of hunting was 
killing; not wanton or wasteful, but plain killing, for 
the excitement to be extracted from it. Yet it must 
not for a minute be supposed that he was a hard or cruel 
man. He was much the contrary. Lowell's keen vision 
detected this on slight contact: "With all his firmness 
he has a very tender and sympathetic nature, or I am 
much mistaken." 16 The tenderness showed in many 
ways. Even as to animals there was an almost exag- 
gerated sympathy, when they were not objects of sport. 
He once worried for days because he had not interfered 
to protect a cat which some boys were chasing. 17 He 
had all the horror of death which is natural to persons 
of energetic vitality. 18 He had the deepest pity for 
suffering and the pity tended quickly to take active 
forms of relief. 

He had especially one of the surest signs of sensibil- 
ity and tenderness, a constant love and appreciation 
of children. He felt their sorrows. "The cry of a child 
always distressed him. It made him quite miserable 
sometimes when he was walking through the village. 
He always wanted to stop and find out what was the 

153 



AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

matter." 19 Their sports and spirits amused him and 
he entered into them quietly but keenly, as if he were 
a child himself. Children understood this, as they al- 
ways do. General Wood, who knew Cleveland well, 
says, "He was as fond of children as was Lincoln. He 
understood them, and they instinctively knew it and 
felt it, and they came to him as a friend." 20 

It is notable that this intimacy with children often 
goes with a rather reserved and generally unsociable 
temperament. We have noticed the same thing in the 
case of Henry Adams. It was strikingly true of General 
Lee as of Cleveland. The explanation is simple. Chil- 
dren ask sympathy and attention. They never ask you 
to give yourself. To Cleveland, as to Lee, the conven- 
tional restraints of formal society were irksome. Cleve- 
land could indeed supply charming platitudes on social 
duty, as in the Fishing Sketches, "Every individual, as 
a unit in the scheme of civilized social life, owes to every 
man, woman, and child within such relationship an 
uninterrupted contribution to the fund of enlivening 
and pleasurable social intercourse." 21 This recalls the 
pretty saying of the old dramatist, "Oh, my lord, we 
are all born in our degrees to make one another merry." 22 
But Cleveland avoided the obligation when he could, 
hated long dinners and pompous ceremonies, and on 
such occasions would often sit perfectly silent and not 
manifest an overpowering interest in the talkativeness 
of others. 

He hated the display and luxury and extravagance 
of society, also. He believed that a nation showed its 
sanity in its simplicity, and the attacks in his writings 

154 



GROVER CLEVELAND 

on the money craze of his contemporaries and their mad 
rush for wealth are so frequent as almost to suggest a 
hobby. He practised frugality as well as preached it, 
cared nothing for costly clothes or fare or ornament. 
One day, during Cleveland's second presidential term, 
a train stopped at the Gray Gables station. "Look," 
called the conductor to the passengers, impersonally, 
"there's Mrs. Cleveland and Grover on the platform." 
The passengers looked. "Well," said one woman, "if 
I had fifty thousand dollars a year, I would n't diess 
like that." 23 

It must not be for a moment supposed, however, that 
Cleveland's economy arose from any taint of meanness. 
He was as indifferent to the accumulation of money as 
to the spending of it. He tells us so himself, speaking 
of the sacrifice of several thousand dollars for an unnec- 
essary scruple, "But I don't deserve any credit for that, 
because money has never been a temptation to me." u 
And others, many others, bear him out. Even in his 
early law practice "he was always indifferent and care- 
less as to his fees. His clients had to offer him money." M 
And the failure to accumulate arose not only from in- 
difference, but from wide generosity. Without the least 
ostentation, he helped many a poor and struggling 
applicant — and non-applicant — over difficulties and 
tight places. When he left the law, his partner wrote : 
" I am now closing up a case of Cleveland's which has 
been running on for years, during all which time he had 
paid all disbursements . . . because the man was too 
poor to meet these necessary expenses. And this is only 
one case out of many that are here on our books." 28 

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AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

The assertion that Cleveland avoided general so- 
ciety does not mean that he did not appreciate human 
relations. To be sure, he found politics rather detrimen- 
tal to friendship. Where there is so much to give, cas- 
ual affection is apt to look for what may be got and to 
wither when disappointed. Also, such firm and self- 
centred natures are less disposed to form human ties 
than those which naturally turn to others for advice and 
comfort and support. But for that very reason the friend- 
ships formed are founded on a deeper comprehension and 
sympathy and are usually loyal and permanent. In the 
last years of his life, Cleveland wrote some touching 
words about his own — perhaps imagined — deficiencies 
in the matter of human association and about his love 
and longing for it. " I have left many things undone I 
ought to have done in the realm of friendship . . . and 
still it is in human nature for one to hug the praise of his 
fellows and the affection of friends to his bosom as his 
earned possession." 27 Certainly no one can read Gilder's 
charming "Record of Friendship" without finding in it 
all the evidence of deep and genuine feeling. And the 
close intimacy of Cleveland and Joseph Jefferson, so 
different in character and in their life-interests, yet 
each so finely tempered in his own way, is one of the 
pleasant traditions of American biography. * 

Cleveland's personal affection went even deeper in 
his domestic relations than with his friends. His mother's 
memory and the depth of her tenderness were treas- 
ured all his life. When he was elected governor of 
New York, he wrote to his brother, "Do you know that 
if mother were alive, I should feel so much safer?" 28 

156 



GROVER CLEVELAND 

After McKinley's term had begun, he said: "I envy 
him to-day only one thing and that was the presence of 
his own mother at his inauguration. I would have 
given anything in the world if my mother could have 
been at my inauguration." 29 All the glimpses that we 
get of his own home life, with wife and children, are 
charming: simple, devoted, sympathetic, undemonstra- 
tive, but participant of joy and grief alike. 

And in all these intimate relations with those who 
knew him best, the quiet, shy, reserved Cleveland of 
general society melted and mellowed into the best of 
company and the most responsive of listeners and talk- 
ers. "He had a real * gift* of silence," says one of his 
biographers; *° that is, he could be silent in a way to 
chill impertinence and curiosity and again, in a very 
different fashion, to inspire enthusiasm and tempt con- 
fidence. And then, with the right company, he would 
talk himself, would drop reserve and restraint and give 
out his hope and heart with singular and engaging 
frankness and so simply that you almost saw the life 
right through the severing veil of speech. 

The picture of Cleveland in these elementary social 
connections would be quite incomplete without rec- 
ognition of his very attractive and winning humor. 
People who know him only as the heavy and somewhat 
solemn official do not appreciate this. Yet even in pub- 
lic addresses he could indulge in a vein of pleasantry, 
as when, in comparing the legal and medical professions, 
he says that the defeated client has the privilege of 
swearing not only at the court, but at his lawyer, but 
"the defeated patient, on the contrary, is very quiet 

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AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

indeed and can only swear at his doctor if he has left 
his profanity in a phonograph to be ground out by his 
executor." 8l And the same tone creeps into the dig- 
nified veto of a pension bill: "Whatever may be said 
of this claimant's achievements during his short mil- 
itary career, it must be conceded that he accumulated 
a great deal of disability." 32 All the evidence goes to 
show that in conversation Cleveland could relish a 
joke and make one, less often perhaps with pointed 
wit than with those shrewd, quiet turns of ironic 
humor so dear to the American heart. The "Fishing 
Sketches" are permeated through and through with 
simple fun of just this sort, which at its best sometimes 
recalls the frolic fancy of Lamb, although it is a Lamb 
with the slightly cumbrous gambol of an elephant. 
"The ways of fishermen are inexplicable," says this 
august follower of the craft. "The best fishermen do 
not attempt it; they move and strive in the atmosphere 
of mystery and uncertainty, constantly aiming to 
reach results without a clue, and through the cultiva- 
tion of faculties, non-existent or inoperative in the 
common mind." 33 And again, fishermen, "to their 
enjoyment and edification, are permitted by a prop- 
erly adjusted mental equipment to believe what they 
hear." " 

in 

From the preceding analysis of Cleveland's personal 
qualities, it will be evident that in some respects 
he was not adapted to political success. Few great 
statesmen have made themselves, by their own def- 

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GROVER CLEVELAND 

inite action in behalf of right, more deliberately un- 
popular. Cleveland himself was perfectly aware of this 
and could even state it with a certain grim enjoyment. 
In speaking of one of his vetoes as governor, he said: 
"Before I was married, I used sometimes to talk to 
myself when I was alone, and after the veto, that night, 
when I was throwing off my clothes, I said aloud: 
'By to-morrow at this time I shall be the most unpop- 
ular man in the State of New York. '" 86 He had little 
or none of that tact which enables some men to ingra- 
tiate themselves more in refusing than others when 
they grant. Shyness, reserve, obstinate determination 
to do right regardless of anybody's feelings, are all far 
from being passports to triumph in American politics. 
Moreover, Cleveland hated publicity and was al- 
ways suspicious and distrustful of newspapers and 
representatives of the press. He had no tincture of the 
useful art of appearing to tell them everything and 
telling them nothing. He had an excellent memory, 
and a paper which had once criticized him unjustly, 
or, even worse, ridiculed him, was disliked and avoided. 
Though self-controlled and self-contained in all his 
passions, journalistic indiscretion was more likely than 
anything else to arouse him to a burst of temper. Of his 
many snubs to reporters perhaps none was more apt 
than the remark to a young fellow who was trying to 
elicit comment on some question of foreign policy: 
"That, sir, is a matter of too great importance to discuss 
in a five-minute interview, now rapidly drawing to its 
close." 36 The retort was shrewd, but not calculated to 
promote affection. 

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AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

On the other hand, even politicians and journalists 
could not fail to appreciate Cleveland's great public 
merits. There is his honesty, his infinite candor. Said 
one journalist, after an attempt to get something, "He 
is the greatest man I ever met — and he wouldn't 
promise to do a thing I wanted." 37 Nothing touches 
the American people like straightforward truth-tell- 
ing. When Cleveland's youthful morals were im- 
peached and he said at once, "Tell the facts," he won 
more votes than any possible subterfuge could have 
gained for him. Veracity was a habit with him, it was 
constitutional. It was so ingrained that, as a fisher- 
man, he could even afford to make a jest of it and 
give as the principle of that fraternity, "In essentials 
- — truthfulness; in non-essentials — reciprocal lati- 
tude." 38 When it was a matter of life, not fishing, 
there was no question of jest. His son once brought 
out the truth under great temptation to the contrary, 
and Cleveland remarked to a near friend that the boy 
"evidently was going to be like him; because untruth- 
fulness seemed to be no temptation whatever to either 
of them." 39 

And as his candor appealed to the American nation, 
so did his democratic way of living and thinking. He 
knew the common people, he had passed all his early 
life in intimate contact with them, and watched them 
and studied them with insight and sympathy, saying 
little, but seeing much. Lowell, with his quick dis- 
cernment, said of him, "He is a truly American type 
of the best kind — a type very dear to me, I confess." *° 
He grasped the large daily facts of human nature, 

160 



GROVER CLEVELAND 

because his own temperament was peculiarly and singly 
based on them. He needed no effort to enter into com- 
mon lives, because his own life was common, in the 
best sense. He would fish all day with an old farmer 
and swap long stories with him and then incidentally 
get and give homely views about political questions. 
When, as governor, he was walking down to the State 
House at Albany, if he came up with the blind crier of 
the courts, he would take his arm and help him along 
over the crossings, and let the business of his great 
office wait. 4l 

He cannot be said to have won votes by pure ora- 
tory. He was not a natural speaker, had not a trace 
of the magnetism that carries vast multitudes away in 
a storm of excitement. At the same time, especially in 
later life, his speeches told. He prepared them with 
the utmost care and delivered them with dignity and 
measured ease, and every hearer felt that they had 
character and purpose behind them. Even his appear- 
ance, while never splendid or imposing, carried the 
stamp of the square, determined energy which con- 
quers the world. 

These things touched the general public. But how 
was it with the political managers? Cleveland is 
generally supposed to have been weak here. His ad- 
mirers often urge that all his success was gained not 
through the politicians, but in spite of them, and that 
he did not stoop to or understand the ordinary methods 
by which the political game is played. Their arguments 
are to a certain extent borne out by his own remark, 
"This talk about the importance of * playing polities' 

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AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

— look at the men who have played it. Have they got 
as far, after all, as I have?" 42 On the other hand, he 
was not so wholly ignorant as some supposed. He 
knew men thoroughly, and such knowledge is the first 
requisite of political success. Moreover, even character 
will not make a man governor of New York, without 
some acquaintance with political machinery. And 
against the above comment of Cleveland we can set 
another, which may not contradict but certainly am- 
plifies it: "Somehow there seems to have been an im- 
pression that I was dealing with something I did not 
understand; but these men little knew how thoroughly 
I had been trained, and how I often laughed in my 
sleeve at their antics." 43 

Also, in political management as in everything else, 
labor counts. Cleveland's superb physical strength 
and tireless industry enabled him to attend to details 
which others are forced to neglect. He always knew 
what was going on, and this is the first step to control- 
ling it. He believed in doing your own work, doing it 
carefully and systematically, and leaving nothing to 
chance. There is an immense secret of achievement 
in the apparently two-edged compliment of Tilden as 
to his distinguished follower: "He is the kind of man 
who would rather do something badly for himself 
than to have somebody else do it well." 44 

And Cleveland had another element of political suc- 
cess. He was an intense party man. We have seen the 
pleasant humor which played over the surface of his 
temperament. But it did not enter into his politics. 
Life was not a game to him, as it was to Seward, or 

162 



GROVER CLEVELAND 

a dainty work of art. He took the Democratic party 
with an almost appalling seriousness. Over and over 
he reiterates that the salvation of the country, if 
not the salvation of the world, must be accomplished 
by the Democrats. His elaborate statement of the 
Democratic creed in 1891 is, to be sure, fairly gen- 
eral; 45 but its possibility of fulfilment was, for him, 
completely bound up with Democratic organization. 
"Of all the wonders that I have seen during my life," 
he said, "none has quite so impressed me as the re- 
serve power of the Democratic party, which seems to 
have the elements of earthly immortality." 46 And 
within a few months of his death he gave cordial 
assent to the most sweeping possible declaration of 
party principle: "Whatever your own party may do, 
it is always a mistake to vote for a Republican." 47 

Yet, from what we have already seen of the man, 
it is hardly necessary to say that he never sacrificed 
and never would have sacrificed duty, as he saw it, 
to any party consideration. At an early stage in his 
career he wrote officially: "I believe in an open and 
sturdy partisanship, which secures the legitimate 
advantages of party supremacy; but parties were 
made for the people, and I am unwilling, knowingly, 
to give my assent to measures purely partisan, which 
will sacrifice or endanger their interests." 48 He never 
did give his assent to such. When he was being con- 
sidered as a candidate for a third nomination, he 
declared, "If I am ever president of this country 
again, I shall be president of the whole country, and 
not of any set of men or class in it." 49 

163 



AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

And, however he may have disapproved of Repub- 
lican principles, he was always fair and even friendly 
toward Republican individuals. His repeated judg- 
ment of McKinley and of McKinley's administra- 
tion showed the broadest appreciation of practical 
difficulties and the keenest sympathy with honest 
effort. 

Further, he did not hesitate to fight the objection- 
able elements in his own party, wherever he found 
them. "We love him for the enemies he has made," 
said General E. S. Bragg at the time of his first nomi- 
nation. 50 The American people loved him for those 
enemies and do still. But the wire-pulling and ring- 
running politicians in the Democratic party did not 
love him and at times he seemed more severed 
from them than from even the Republicans. Colonel 
Watterson declares that "He split his party wide 
open. The ostensible cause was the money issue. But 
underlying this there was a deal of personal embit- 
terment. . . . Through Mr. Cleveland the party of 
Jefferson, Jackson, and Tilden was converted from a 
Democratic into a Populist." 51 This is an exaggerated 
view. Yet it is certain that lack of political tact, and 
perhaps an increasing fixity in his own opinions, 
fostered by too great disregard of criticism, brought 
Cleveland into a vast amount of friction. Speaking of 
him and Harrison, Henry Adams says, in his epigram- 
matic fashion, "Whatever harm they might do their 
enemies, was as nothing when compared to the mor- 
tality they inflicted on their friends." 52 There was 
trouble with friends and enemies both. Cleveland's 

164 



GROVER CLEVELAND 

difficulties with the Senate are matter of history and, 
although he may have had abstract reason on his side, 
the results for his administrative usefulness could not 
but be harmful. 

Also, all these public conflicts were isolating, pro- 
duced a feeling of helplessness and depression, even 
in a temperament so calm and solid as his. In 1894 
he wrote, "There never was a man in this high office 
so surrounded with difficulties and so perplexed and 
so treacherously treated and so abandoned by those 
whose aid he deserves, as the present incumbent. 
But there is a God, and the patriotism of the American 
people is not dead; nor is all truth and virtue and sin- 
cerity gone out of the Democratic party." 53 The pa- 
triotism of the American people is not dead yet, and 
the very isolation which at the time seemed to prove 
the president unpractical and impracticable, serves 
to-day to increase his dignity and to place him secure 
above all parties as a great American. 

rv 

But let us elucidate a little more definitely what 
Cleveland actually stands for in American history; 
since it must be supposed that the man whose sum- 
ming up of official duty gave rise to the phrase, 
"Public office is a public trust," 54 and who gave his 
life to working from that text, must have left some 
memorial of permanent significance. 

It may be recognized at once that this memorial is 
not to be sought mainly in positive, progressive achieve- 
ment. Cleveland would not, of course, have denied the 

165 



AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

possibility or desirability of progress. Some of his utter- 
ances, especially as to the accumulation of wealth, 
have a radical tone which sounds like the advanced 
twentieth century. Still, it cannot be said that he 
initiated great movements or changes of any kind. 
Even his most positive efforts, as with the tariff and 
civil service reform, like his splendid private useful- 
ness in the insurance world, were in the nature of a re- 
turn to purer and saner ideals, an endeavor to put pub- 
lic business on the basis of thrift and common sense 
which is absolutely necessary to success in the con- 
duct of private affairs. 

For the man was essentially, by habit and tempera- 
ment, a thorough conservative. It may seem a little 
surprising to find such a type in the Democratic party, 
at least in the North. To understand this, we must 
appreciate the wholesome, admirable truth that in 
our American system each of the two major parties is 
capable of being either conservative or radical. We 
usually think of the Republicans as conservative, en- 
trenched in tradition and custom. Yet the cardinal 
principle of Republicanism is the strength and vitality 
of the federal government, and, as the most far-reach- 
ing progress and radical change must come through 
that government, it is natural that radical and progres- 
sive elements should be constantly found in Republi- 
can alliance. On the other hand, while the Democrats 
suggest radicalism, their two fundamental tenets have 
always been the reduction of all government inter- 
ference to the lowest terms and in especial a jealous 
assertion of the state governments against the federal. 

166 



GROVER CLEVELAND 

Under the American Constitution these two principles 
mean instinctive, persistent conservatism. 

It is thus that we find Cleveland, in the midst of so 
many radical, disturbing elements, the incarnation of 
conservatism, of a firm, insistent, reiterated negative. 
The value of such a negative force in any popular govern- 
ment may be measured by the difficulty of maintaining 
it. To say no, is the ordinary politician's stumbling- 
block. Even when he is forced to say it, he mouths it 
with qualifying adjectives and explanations, seeking in 
vain to mix the opposing bitter with the seducing sweet. 
"Blaine and I," said Garfield, "... have too much pain 
in the refusals we have constantly to make." 55 

This was never the trouble with Cleveland. A good, 
round, sonorous no came from him without the slight- 
est difficulty and there was no disputing and no re- 
voking it. From this point of view even his limitations 
w r ere a help to him. He was not a broad, speculative 
political thinker, did not suffer from the doubts and 
qualifications that always accompany such thought. 
His most abstract writing, "Presidential Problems," 
is perfectly concrete, though the questions treated in it 
would have been tempting to a discursive, imaginative 
philosopher. "It is a condition which confronts us — 
not a theory," is perhaps Cleveland's best-known say- 
ing. 56 He was always dealing with conditions, dealing 
with them fairly, honestly, but practically, and leaving 
theories on one side. The strong features of his char- 
acter were all such as to give the conservative, negative 
element full force and vigor. He was simple and direct, 
and that helps. He was immensely silent, and that 

167 



AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

helps. He had unlimited patience, and patience is as 
indispensable in conservatism as in other things. As he 
himself said, "Certainly the potency of patience as a 
factor in all worldly achievement and progress cannot 
be overestimated." B7 Finally he had determination 
pushed to a degree which he himself was perfectly 
ready to call obstinacy, "his native obstinacy, which 
he always insisted was his principal virtue." 58 He 
said on one occasion, " I want to tell you now that, if 
every other man in the country abandons this issue, 
I shall stick to it." 69 He said it and he meant it. 

We have only to consider the chief historical events 
associated with Cleveland's name to see how marked 
in all of them is this negative element. I have already 
said that it was largely characteristic of his tariff 
activity. Negative, his effort to check the free coin- 
age of silver. Negative, his superb action in the great 
railroad strike. Negative, essentially, even the most 
criticized of all his performances, the Venezuela mes- 
sage to Congress. As we look through his writings and 
those of his biographers, the thing that impresses us 
most overwhelmingly is veto, veto, veto. No doubt 
this is the chief function that all American constitu- 
tions leave to the executive. But in Cleveland's case 
it seems to have been exercised with temperamental 
readiness. Take his mayoralty, take his governorship, 
take his presidency: always the veto. His vetoes in 
four years amounted to "more than twice the number 
in the aggregate of all his predecessors," says Richard- 
son. 60 And of course in no case was the motive mere 
opposition or petulance or personal grudge. Every 

168 



GROVER CLEVELAND 

veto was thought out with the most scrupulous care 
and justified with the most patient reasoning. The 
first functionary in the country sat up night after 
night till the small hours, studying why he should say 
no to the petty and insignificant petition of some 
fraudulent pensioner. 

From one point of view there is infinite pathos in 
seeing a great statesman spend his soul on such mi- 
nute detail of negation, instead of on the unsolved 
problems of the world. The ultimate value and fruit- 
fulness of this negative attitude appears only when we 
consider that it was based upon the deepest, strongest, 
fundamental belief in the people and in popular gov- 
ernment. For all his conservatism, Cleveland was no 
reactionary, no aristocrat, no advocate of ruling the 
masses by the assumed superior wisdom of a chosen 
few. He held that the people should rule themselves, 
that they could, and that they would, if a free chance 
was given them. He believed in American ideals, 
American traditions. He speaks of his "passionate 
Americanism," 61 and the phrase, coming from one who 
knew and swayed his passions, is immensely significant. 
And he believed in popular government because he put 
behind it the whole mass and solidity of his belief in 
God. God had ordained the framing of the American 
Republic. God sustained it. "A free people," he said, 
"without standards of right beyond what they saw 
or did, without allegiance to something unseen above 
them all, would soon sink below their own level." 62 

It was just because he believed heartily and wholly 
in American popular government that he wished to 

169 



AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

guard it as it was. Let those who believed in neither 
God nor man keep restlessly trying exoeriments, over- 
turning the old without any assurance of the new. 
He had studied the Constitution as the Fathers had 
left it. He had seen it working and believed it would 
work still. It might be imperfect, like other human 
inventions. Would the new devices be less so? The 
thing was, to take the old and treat it honestly, indus- 
triously, faithfully. So treated, it would justify itself 
in the future as it had done in the past. 

Thus it was that as a superb negative force acting 
for a great positive purpose Grover Cleveland did his 
work in the world. A few grand phrases of his own 
show how he did it better than any description I can 
furnish. Speaking of Lincoln and his many military 
pardons, he said: "Notwithstanding all that might 
be objectionable in these, what was he doing? He was 
fortifying his own heart! And that was his strength, 
his own heart; that is a man's strength." 63 Fortify- 
ing his own heart! Again, there is the splendid sentence 
about Secrteary Carlisle: "We are just right for each 
other; he knows all I ought to know, and I can bear 
all we have to bear. 9 * 64 Could a man say it more 
humbly and simply, "I can bear all I have to bear"? 
Finally, there are almost the last words he ever ut- 
tered, and what finer last words could any human 
being utter? " I have tried so hard to do right." 65 

A four-square, firm, solid, magnificent Titan, who 
could speak the everlasting no, so rare and so essen- 
tial in democracy. We still await the genius even 
greater than he, who can speak the everlasting yes. 

170 



VII 

HENRY JAMES 



CHRONOLOGY 

Henry James. 

Born, New York City, April 15, 1843.' 

Educated in France and Switzerland and at 

Harvard Law School. 
From 1869 lived mainly in England. 
Roderick Hudson published, 1875. 
Daisy Miller published, 1878. 
The Portrait of a Lady published, 1881. 
What Maisie Knew published, 1897. 
The Ambassadors published, 1903. 
The Golden Bowl published, 1904. 
The American Scene published, 1907. 
A Small Boy and Others published, 1913. 
Became British subject, July 26, 1915. 
Died, London, February 28, 1916. 







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HENRY JAMES 
By J.S. Sargent, R.A. 



VII 
HENRY JAMES 



He was a man whose whole life was in art, and to whom 
life and art were inextricably one. He had no wife, he 
had no children, he had no country; for his flitting and 
vagrant cosmopolitan youth uprooted him from Amer- 
ica, and, although the Great War impelled him at last 
to declare himself an English citizen, he had too much 
the habit of the wide world to become definitely identi- 
fied with any particular nation. He lived and thought 
and felt to w r rite great novels, and he wrote them, 
novels of an impossible subtlety and complexity, yet 
too beautiful and too original for men to let them die. 
Of course all his art was based on life. He repeats 
and reiterates this. From an almost abnormally early 
age he began to study the faces and the hearts about 
him, to make notes, to register impressions, to accumu- 
late material which might, somehow or other, some- 
time or other, serve his great and never-forgotten 
purpose. He was absolutely sincere in this. One of 
the great charms of his character in every aspect is 
sincerity and it is as evident in his art as in his daily 
living. He wanted truth and nothing else, to grasp it 
patiently and render it faithfully. "The novelist is a 
particular window, absolutely," he says, — "and of 
worth in so far as he is one." 1 And again, "I may 

173 



AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

therefore venture to say that the air of reality . . . 
seems to me to be the supreme virtue of a novel." * 
And yet again, more personally, "For myself I live, 
live intensely and am fed by life, and my value, what- 
ever it be, is in my own kind of expression of that." 8 

He was always an acute, minute, tireless observer. 
He observed the external world constantly, and, 
though he was too busy with humanity to indulge 
often in long natural descriptions, he used delicate, 
fleeting touches to set human passion in just the back- 
ground that will make it most impressive and most 
enthralling. He observed the outward frame of man 
with endless patient care and few have been more 
cunning in teasing it to yield its secrets. Above all, he 
observed the soul with curiosity and comprehension 
and even with tender sympathy, with awe and due, 
modest sense of the groping incompetence of the wisest, 
and perhaps he might have summed up his observation 
in the simple words of one of his characters, "Every- 
thing 's terrible, cara — in the heart of man." 4 

Yet, for all this constant and searching observation, 
as one studies James, one gets an overwhelming sense 
that to him life was chiefly interesting, not in itself, 
but as matter for art. The crowding, shifting, shud- 
dering turmoil of human existence was stuff to make 
novels of, or it was nothing. "All art is expression" 
he says, " and is thereby vividness." 6 But to him the 
expression was more than the thing expressed. Fact 
was crude, cumbrous, intrusive, perplexing. "More 
distinct and more numerous than I mostly like facts. . . . 
Nine tenths of the artist's interest in them is that of 

174 



HENRY JAMES 

what he shall add to them and how he shall turn 
them." 6 Of his early youth, he tells us, "My face 
was turned from the first to the idea of representa- 
tion — that of the gain of charm, interest, mystery, 
dignity, distinction, gain of importance in fine, on the 
part of the represented thing (over the thing of acci- 
dent, of mere actuality, still unappropriated)." 7 

His object was always to make an exquisite, perfect 
work of art, and life must be fitted, moulded, trans- 
formed into a flawless achievement of ideal beauty; 
not the shallow beauty which eschews superficial 
ugliness, but the larger harmony which draws all 
threads and strands together into the final triumph 
of workmanship. Considerations extraneous to art, 
so-called moral aims and purposes, were to be discarded 
as merely distracting and inappropriate. It is true 
that few men ever lived with a finer or more delicate 
moral instinct, true also that moral motives and subtle 
questions of conduct often supplied the richest field 
for artistic disquisition. But again, these were only 
the material, interesting and valuable as furnishing 
stuff for the absorbing artistic passion to develop all 
its resources of cunning and cleverness. To teach 
lessons, to make the world better, this was not the 
artist's business, nor even was he bound to consider 
whether he might make it worse. Things beautiful 
ought not to make it worse, at any rate. 

Not only did the intense preoccupation with artistic 
excellence shut out moral considerations; it even dis- 
tracted thought from the vast variety and richness of 
life in general. It seems as if James, through all his 

175 



AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

long volumes, worked with bare soul and neglected 
the casual garb of circumstance, the outer trapping of 
profession and vocation, which differentiates souls to 
the eye of the more superficial observer. Balzac in his 
way, Trollope in his, produced a wide range of types, 
doctors, lawyers, preachers, workers in a dozen varied 
lines of human activity. There are few of these in 
James, and they appear only at moments, for some 
fleeting agency in the dramatic action. Generally 
speaking, also, he is confined to a limited social class, 
does not depict or care for the great ordinary herd 
which makes up the substance of humanity. I do not 
know of any more naive confession of such spiritual 
exclusiveness than the sentence in the. preface to the 
revised edition of "The Princess Casamassima": 
"We care, our curiosity and our sympathy care, com- 
paratively little for what happens to the stupid, the 
coarse, and the blind; care for it, and for the effects of 
it, at the most as helping to precipitate what happens 
to the more deeply wondering, to the really senti- 
ent." 8 Yet the stupid, the coarse, and the blind make 
up the bulk of the world. Even if we presume to set 
ourselves above them, can we disregard them so com- 
pletely? 

There is no doubt that this detachment of Henry 
James from the crude facts of life was much fostered 
by his early and constant internationalism, his imper- 
sonal separation from all countries as such, not except- 
ing his native America. One of his most ardent ad- 
mirers declares that his chief mission was to civilize 
the United States. If so, it is to be feared that he did 

176 



HENRY JAMES 

not greatly fulfil it. At any rate, America was a puzzle 
to him in earlier days, so far as he gave his thoughts to 
it at all; and when he came to study it in his old age, 
the puzzle was not diminished for him and certainly 
not for his readers. All the intense, crowding, sweat- 
ing, grinding human complexity, which throbs from 
Boston to San Francisco, was mainly lost on him. It 
terrified him, dismayed him, was "stupid, coarse, 
blind," above all was too rough and violent to be fitted 
into nice, gauzy, shimmering webs of artistic achieve- 
ment. 

A striking illustration of this mighty predominance 
of the artistic attitude in James's temperament is that, 
keen as his powers of observing were, he was com- 
paratively indifferent to fact as a matter of record, 
had not at least that sense of its sacredness which is 
inherent in the born historian. When he read the 
novels of his friends, he was not so much interested in 
them as they stood, but was busy always with the 
thought of rewriting them, making them over as they 
should have been in his artistic conception. His own 
past work he was not content to accept as a record of 
his own past self, to leave it to others as such a record ; 
but in his old age he revised and altered with the most 
singular assiduity, producing, after all, a result, that 

was truly characteristic neither of his age nor of his 
youth. Matthew Arnold said, when reprinting some 
early writings, "Exactly as they stand, I should not 
have written them now, but perhaps they are none the 
worse on that account." 9 This was far from the atti- 
tude of James. Most curious of all, in publishing 

177 



AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

letters of his brother, he actually altered the text, 
alleging that what he saw fit to substitute was more 
characteristic than what his brother actually wrote. 10 
And I do not know how the artist's claim to dominate 
crude fact can go farther than that. 

So, although we must recognize that life and the 
study of life form the undeniable basis of James's, as 
of all other art, we constantly feel that with him the 
artistic instinct is so engrossing, so involving, that 
life is absorbed and smothered by it. There is analy- 
sis, endless analysis, inexhaustible analysis, reflec- 
tion, dissection, connection, till a trifle seems drawn 
out to the end of the world. What other human being 
has more appreciated "the quite incalculable tendency 
of a mere grain of subject-matter to expand and de- 
velop and cover the ground when conditions happen to 
favor it"? 11 Nothing is left to stand out alone in 
vivid isolation and compelling brevity. The slightest 
motive is traced back into its roots and finest fibres, 
defined and refined, until it becomes at once monstrous 
and impalpable. The method is so subtle and elaborate 
that the trivial is made important by intense minute- 
ness in the study of it and the very same minuteness 
makes the important trivial. Naturally this complica- 
tion is least intrusive in the admirable short stories, 
and it took years to develop from the comparative 
clarity of "Roderick Hudson" to the extraordinary 
depths of "The Wings of the Dove" and "The Golden 
Bowl." But it is the mark of James's work every- 
where and of his mind. He reveled in "shades" and 
again and again he enlarges on them. He reproaches 

178 



*. 



HENRY JAMES 

Bourget with the "love of intellectual daylight," 
which "is an injury to the patches of ambiguity and 
the abysses of shadow which really are the clothing — 
or much of it — of the effects that constitute the mate- 
rial of our trade." 12 His own characters grope in am- 
biguity and are garmented in shadow. He loved ghost 
stories; but all his work is one great ghost story, with 
the uneasy thrill, the teasing intensity of vagueness — 
and the charm. 

And here it must be insisted that never, never does 
James's artistic passion degenerate into a mere mysti- 
fication of words. He is as far as possible from the 
tendency to disguise emptiness under phraseology 
which is the plague of Browning. On the contrary, 
words fail him, will not serve him, in the long, far pur- 
suit of faint subtleties of distinction for which there 
are no words. He strains words, forces them, loads 
them with content past what their frail natures will 
endure, and then still there is something beyond them 
and him, shimmering, impalpable, which he strives to 
feel and to make his reader feel, and cannot. The mere 
verbalist in literature seeks to make nothing real, but 
James's process is rather to refine away reality to 
nothing. 

And that which should give substance and structure 
to this gelatinous mass of analysis, the secret of com- 
position, simply betrays this passionate and consci- 
entious artist still further. He has elaborate principles 
and theories of order, of balance, of design; but they 
are too elaborate and serve rather to increase the com- 
plication than to clarify it. He himself was fond of 

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AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

insisting upon his dramatic instinct, maintained that 
he saw life in scenes and developed his stories largely 
upon a scenic method. Yet the dramatic theory, like 
the analytic, was excessive in its nature and rather 
deprived his work of sustained interest than informed 
it with breathing life. His plays, like his novels, are 
fascinatingly brilliant in detail: like the novels, they 
involve the reader in a labyrinth of shades from which 
there is no possible extrication. "It is art that makes 
life*," he said; 1S and while there may be a sense in 
which this is profoundly true for all of us, life punished 
him by setting his great and original work apart from 
the thought of most persons whose real business is to 
live. 

For there was never a more curious case of the 
intense, unselfish passion for art pushed so far as really 
to injure itself, to obscure itself by obscuring the 
material on which it works. To refine, to distinguish, 
to conjure up problems for the mere pleasure of solving 
them — these are different tastes from the passion for 
life as such. "You see what a mistake you'd make 
to see abysses of subtlety in my having been merely 
natural," says one of James's own characters. 14 She 
might have said it to her creator. "I love life — in art, 
though I hate it anywhere else," says another. 15 And 
it would not be fair to say this of her creator unrestrict- 
edly, but there would be a certain point in it. Far 
more significant and suggestive, in fact of a singular 
weight and significance for James's whole work, is his 
cruel phrase about himself: "And I find our art, all 
the while, more difficult of practice, and want, with 

180 



HENRY JAMES 

that, to do it in a more and more difficult way; it being 
really, at bottom, only difficulty that interests me. 
Which is a most accursed way to be constituted." 18 

II 

Did the man, then, you ask, have no life of his own, 
aside from his absorbing preoccupation with art? It is 
surprising how little, as far as the records that we have 
inform us. No doubt these records are limited. The 
two volumes of delightful letters, recently published, 
belong to the writer's mature and later rife and nat- 
urally show more of reflection than passion. The three 
volumes of autobiography also were written in old age, 
and in such a temperament it was inevitable that 
thoughts should be more remembered than feelings. 
Yet even so in a history of. boyhood one would expect 
some outburst of hearty and violent experience, and 
there is none, none: just an endless chain of subtle 
analyses of petty facts, the vast dissection of "a 
case" like "the cases" of the novels, in which all 
petulant, vivid assertion of personality is drowned, 
absorbed, in shades, refinements, complications, con- 
nections, without stint or limit. There is at times the 
vague intimation of longing to live, of regret for not 
having lived. Surely there is something personal to the 
author in the words of Strether in "The Ambassa- 
dors": "Live all you can; it's a mistake not to. ... I 
was either, at the right time, too stupid or too intel- 
ligent to have it [the illusion of freedom], and now I'm 
a case of reaction against the mistake." 17 Further, 
there is the insistence that the artist must live to ac- 

181 



AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

cumulate his stock in trade: "We must know, as much 
as possible, in our beautiful art, yours and mine, what 
we are talking about — and the only way to know is to 
have lived and loved and cursed and floundered and 
enjoyed and suffered. I think I don't regret a single 
'excess* of my responsive youth — I only regret in my 
chilled age, certain occasions and possibilities I did n't 
embrace." 18 And this does sound like the thrill of 
human existence. But I am inclined to set against it 
the words to Howells, "such fine primitive passions 
lose themselves for me in the act of contemplation, or 
at any rate in the act of reproduction." 19 Since the 
weight of evidence goes to show that for this intensely 
concentrated spirit, in youth as well as in age, contem- 
plation, profound inward absorption was the essence 
of life, and I find endless significance in the revealing 
phrase of William James as to his younger brother, 
when scarcely out of boyhood, "Never did I see a so- 
much uninterested creature in the affairs of those 
about him." 20 

Let us consider him in relation to the common con- 
cerns of men and see how much alive he was. Sport, 
athletics, exercise? None whatever, even in the 
sporting years. Though he was of a nervous, anxious 
temperament, nothing in his physique would seem to 
have cut him off from bodily activity. But no aspect 
of it appears to have interested him, and none enters 
into his novels. 

Money, business? He was frugal and self-controlled 
in his own expenditure, wisely liberal as regards others. 
He would have liked to make money from his work for 

182 



HENRY JAMES 

a little more amplitude of living. But money as an ob- 
ject in life he abhorred, and the business man, as a 
type, including in his fancy most of his American fel- 
low-citizens, was as monotonous as he was detestable. 

Even books, reading, were of minor importance, ex- 
cept those that bore directly upon his own pursuit. He 
does indexed say that "reading tends to take for me the 
place of experience," 21 and he at times expresses en- 
thusiasm for it. Beyond doubt, he was intimately fa- 
miliar with the works of modern novelists. But the great 
writers of the past, even the imaginative writers, do not 
figure largely in his life. 

Nor does it seem that he thought widely or cu- 
riously. His father was a subtle metaphysician, his 
brother an active and creative one. Henry watched 
their lucubrations rather helplessly and very indiffer- 
ently. Science interested him no more than meta- 
physics. The great physical discoveries of the age he 
lived in left him without enthusiasm. On all these per- 
sonal points the evidence of the novels must, of course, 
be used with caution. But the utter absence of broad 
intellectual movement in them only supports the tes- 
timony of the letters and autobiographies. It is true 
that this concrete attitude toward life, coupled with 
the tendency to dissolve the spirit in endless shades and 
complications, produced a singular respect and awe 
in face of the individual soul and its independent exist- 
ence. This is what James's secretary, Miss Bosanquet, 
means, when she calls his novels "a sustained and 
passionate plea for the fullest freedom of the individ- 
ual development that he saw continually imperiled by 

183 



AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

barbarian stupidity." " But if he respected the soul, 
he did not care to philosophize about it. Even as to his 
own art, which he discusses so often and so acutely, the 
discussion is more apt to be concerned with the con- 
crete than with philosophical aspects. "Thank God," 
he says, "I've no opinions. ... I'm more and more 
only aware of things as a more or less mad panorama, 
phantasmagoria and dime museum." 28 

This comment was, indeed, made in regard to 
politics, although its significance is far more than po- 
litical. As to public affairs, James's indifference, until 
his very last years, was mainly sovereign. Here his in- 
ternationalism appears as both cause and effect. A man 
who has no country is not likely to be intensely patriotic. 
A man who cares little for the history of the past is 
not likely to be much aroused over the social and po- 
litical movements of the present. " I fear I am too lost 
in the mere spectacle for any decent morality," he 
says. 24 Even the spectacle interested him more as em- 
bodied in individuals than as affecting great masses 
of men. 

With religion it was much as with other abstract 
motives. James himself confesses that he had little 
contact with practical religion in his youth, and it is 
obvious that he had little interest in it in age. His 
spiritual attitude is perhaps as well summed up in the 
following passage as anywhere. " I don't know why we 
live — the gift of life comes to us from I don't know 
what source or for what purpose; but I believe we can 
go on living for the reason that (always of course up to 
a certain point) life is the most valuable thing we know 

184 



HENRY JAMES 

anything about." 25 Of prayer he says, "I don't pray 
in general, and don't understand it." 26 Of a future life 
he says, "It takes one whole life — for some persons, at 
least dontje suis — to learn how to live at all; which is 
absurd if there is not to be another in which to apply the 
lesson." 27 Of Balzac, whom he so greatly admired, he 
says: "His sincere, personal beliefs may be reduced to 
a very compact formula; he believed that it was possi- 
ble to write magnificent novels, and that he was the 
man to do it." 28 Again, "Of what is to be properly 
called religious feeling we do not remember a suggestion 
in all his many pages." 29 I do not know why these 
words cannot be aptly applied to Henry James. 

We may indeed appreciate keenly the lack in others 
of what we lack ourselves. In "The American Scene" 
James expresses with the utmost vigor the religious de- 
ficiencies of his countrymen: "The field of American 
life is as bare of the Church as a billiard table of a 
centre-piece; a truth that the myriad little structures 
'attended' on Sundays and on the 'off' evenings of 
their 'sociables' proclaim as with the audible sound of 
the roaring of a million mice." 30 But the complaint 
here is rather aesthetic than devotional, and the 
aesthetic side of religion was what touched James most. 
Yet it is extremely curious to note that even his aesthetic 
enjoyments were dwarfed and dulled by the absorbing 
passion of creative analysis. Again, speaking of Balzac, 
he remarks his lack of appreciation of the beauty of the 
world and explains it by saying that "Balzac was as 
little as possible of a poet." 31 And as before one feels 
that James was as little as possible of a poet also. Ex- 

185 



AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

ternal nature, when touched at all in his novels and in 
his letters, is touched, like everything else, with ex- 
treme and fine imaginative delicacy. But there is 
rarely any indication of rapture about it. In art he was 
familiar with great painting and at times shows a 
deep interest in it. He adored Italy for its artistic 
richness, for its depth of memory, and for its melan- 
choly associative beauty. But outside of painting he 
does not seem to have cared much for the simply beau- 
tiful. His pleasure in poetry was limited. He never 
wrote it and seldom read it, unless certain French 
writers. Music was a sealed world to him. 

It is when we come to human relations that James 
as a man really begins to seem alive. To be sure, like 
most intellectual workers, he lived much in solitude 
and cherished it, sought again and again to find some 
remote corner of the world where he could order and 
develop his crowding visions without the bustling in- 
trusion of critics or flatterers or even friends. Yet in 
the main he enjoyed people, enjoyed frequenting so- 
ciety and dining out, haunting the thick throng for the 
inspiration and stimulus it gave his curious spirit. He 
sighs in age over the social ideal of his youth: "The 
waltz-like, rhythmic rotation from great country- 
house to great country-house, to the sound of perpet- 
ual music and the acclamation of the 'house-parties' 
that gather to await you." 32 His conversation was de- 
lightful, full of wit, color, suggestion, a trifle moderate 
and elaborate, like his writing, but rich with succu- 
lence and charm. "When he could not get the very 
word or adjective he wanted, it was most amusing to 

186 



HENRY JAMES 

see him with one hand in the air, till he found it, when 
he flashed his hand down into the palm of the other and 
brought with a triumphant look the word he wanted, 
the exact word." 33 And his talk, like his books, and 
like the whole man himself, was always sincere: ear- 
nest, scrupulous, and winning in its sincerity. The no- 
ble, thoughtful, kindly face alone was enough to make 
a friend of you. 

How I should like to get some glimpse of Henry 
James in love! But this side of his life is completely 
hidden from us. He makes no allusion to it in the auto- 
biography and there is no hint of it in his letters. Yet 
his novels are saturated with love, contain, in fact, 
little or nothing else, though it is love quintessenced 
and alembicated till it hardly knows itself. One would 
suppose that there was plenty of it in his life. And his 
love-letters would have been one of the curiosities of lit- 
erature. Fancy the subtleties, the spiritual doublings, 
the harassing doubts and questions and qualifications ! 
Yet this may be all wrong, and actual, absorbing love 
might have simplified and clarified his soul beyond any- 
thing else on earth. Who can say? Unless some woman 
still lives who has some of those letters. All that comes 
to us is the lovely, searching, pathetic suggestion in six 
words, "the starved romance of my life." 34 

What we do know and actually see and hear is the 
depth of his tenderness and devotion to his family and 
friends, though even this warm and rushing stream does 
at times risk extinction in the huge quagmire of his 
haunting analysis. Hear him enlarge on the word 
" liking," and wonder at him : "The process represented 

187 



AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

by that word was for each of us, I think, a process so 
involved with other operations of the spirit, so beau- 
tifully complicated and deformed by them, that our 
results in this sort doubtless eventually lost themselves 
in the labyrinth of our reasons." 35 And well they 
might ; but fortunately they did n't. I know no letters 
more filled with a penetrating, involving affection. 
This love, he admits, counts for more in the world than 
even art, though he admits it grudgingly : " You are pre- 
cious to literature — but she is precious to the affections, 
which are larger, yet in a still worse way." 36 When 
those he loves are absent, he longs for them with a hun- 
gry longing which nothing else can satisfy, longs for 
news of them, longs for words of solicitude and thoughts 
of tenderness. In spite of his brother's youthful charge 
of lack of interest, he enters into their joys and triumphs. 
He enters into their griefs and sufferings also, and with 
a comprehension and sweetness and tact of sympathy 
which must have been infinitely helpful. I cannot omit 
the earnest, frank, wise, noble words which he ad- 
dressed to one he loved, in a great sorrow. Nothing 
marks more the real depth of humanity hidden in him 
under the apparently indifferent surface: "Only sit 
tight yourself and go through the movements of life. That 
keeps up our connection with life — I mean of the im- 
mediate and apparent life; behind which, all the while, 
the deeper and darker and unapparent, in which things 
really happen to us, learns, under that hygiene, to stay 
in its place. Let it get out of its place and it swamps 
the scene ; besides which its place, God knows, is enough 
for it! Live it all through, every inch of it — out of it 

188 



HENRY JAMES 

something valuable will come — but live it ever so 
quietly." 87 

So it seems that the whole personal life of James, 
aside from his art, centered in simple human affection. 
And the flower of this affection was his passionate 
interest in the Great War. I do not think he was much 
concerned with the political and moral questions in- 
volved. He rarely discusses or refers to them, and such 
things never had interested him before. But those he 
loved were suffering, those whom his friends loved 
were suffering, humanity was suffering. And all the 
depths of tenderness, which lay always, not smothered, 
but eclipsed, forgotten, at the bottom of his heart, 
was called into intense, active, beneficent energy. 
If it had not been for those terrible years, something 
would have been missing, not to his character, for it 
was there deep hidden all along, but to our understand- 
ing and appreciation of his character. He was always 
a great writer, but the war revealed him to every one 
as a most lovable man. 

in 

Yet, after all, his real humanity, his essential, vivid, 
passionate existence, was in his art, and it is most 
curious to watch him living perfectly in the exercise 
of that, when he was so largely oblivious to every- 
thing else. "What's art but an intense life — if it be 
real?" says one of his characters. 38 The art of Henry 
James was an intense life, at any rate. 

All his days he labored at it and much of his nights 
was given to new developments, new inventions, new 

189 



AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

and vaster analysis. The taking of notes was his busi- 
ness. He took notes on pleasure and pain, on suffering 
and hope, notes on any casual incident of life, notes on 
his family, on his friends, on himself. "If one was to 
undertake to tell tales," he says, "and to report with 
truth on the human scene, it could be but because 
'notes' had been from the cradle the ineluctable con- 
sequence of one's greatest inward energy." 39 In this 
close and unremitting effort there was, of course, a large 
amount of ambition, of desire for direct and obvious 
success, butfit was also a matter of instinct, of a habit 
of life which with daily exercise grew ever more exact- 
ing and more tyrannous. 

And it was not only the formal daily habit, the rooted 
necessity of accomplishing a definite task at a definite 
hour. There was a splendid glow and thrill of excite- 
ment in the work. External stimulus might help, 
the commendation of friends, the enthusiasm of ad- 
mirers, even the stinging of captious critics. But the 
external was often more annoying than helpful. "I 
wince even at eulogy, and I wither (for exactly 2 min- 
utes and H) at any qualification of adulation." 40 
What really counted was the rushing, the inexplicable 
artistic impetus itself. Why should a weary soul toil 
and strain to make a troop of shadows strut and fret 
and vex themselves for an hour and then fade utterly? 
Who knows? But James did it with devouring passion, 
like so many others. And the decay of age and the 
wretched debility of the body did not diminish one 
jot the fury of creative hope. At sixty-five he writes: 
"I never have had such a sense of almost bursting, 

190 



HENRY JAMES 

late in the day though it be, with violent and lately too 
much repressed creative . . . intention." 41 

And of course triumph and success, when they came, 
as they did come in even James's remote, perplexed, 
and unpopular career, were acceptable, were welcome. 
To what artist are they not? "Daisy Miller has been, 
as I have told you before, a really quite extraordinary 
hit," 42 and such hits do tickle the heart that is most 
detached. But the best glory — perhaps — is the feel- 
ing of secure achievement, and the best commendation 
is one's own: "The thing carries itself to my maturer 
and gratified sense as with every symptom of sound- 
ness, an insolence of health and joy." 43 

The mischief of it is that this splendid exultation in 
what one has accomplished does not, cannot last. 
There are the difficulties of accomplishing anything. 
There are the external difficulties, the horrid plague 
of printers and publishers, interruptions, distractions. 
There are the internal difficulties, still worse, when in- 
spiration simply stops and one sits and stares and longs 
and does nothing and gets nowhere. Moreover, no 
critic, however captious, sees one's defects so clearly 
and overpoweringly as one sees them one's self. One 
sees them so well, is so cuttingly aware of the weak 
points, that on dark days it seems as if the work was 
all weak points and nothing else. 

And then come depression and discouragement, even 
in a buoyant soul, and James, as he himself admits, 
had a soul to which anxiety and dread came far too 
easily. He is depressed if he is prevented from work- 
ing. When he begins a piece of work, he is haunted by 

191 



AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

"a nervous fear that I shall not have enough of my 
peculiar tap to 'go round.'" 44 And again, "To finish 
a book in quiet and to begin another in fear. " 45 While 
the completion is really as agitating as the commence- 
ment : "always ridden by a superstitious terror of not fin- 
ishing, for finishing's and for the precedent's sake, what 
I have begun." 46 And for those who look upon author- 
ship as an ecstasy, he has this general comment, which 
is certainly not exhilarating: "The profession of delight 
has always struck me as the last to consort, for the 
artist, with any candid account of his troubled effort — 
ever the sum, for the most part, of so many lapses and 
compromises, simplifications and surrenders." 47 

Also, however indifferent one may be to the commen- 
dation of the general public, the sense of failure is 
wearing, blighting to any mortal man. And it cannot 
be denied that, as regards the reading world at large, 
failure was the usual lot of Henry James. Works re- 
jected, works accepted and delayed indefinitely in pub- 
lication, works published and then treated with care- 
less indifference, bringing little praise and less profit — 
when these torment the beginner in literature, he 
may remember that they also tormented the greatest 
of American novelists. 

Nothing epitomizes better James's struggle and 
effort, his gleams of hope and success, and his complete 
lack of it in the grosser sense, than his dealings with the 
theatre. He did not turn his attention to the stage till 
comparatively late in life, and therefore there was al- 
ways the consolation that if he had begun younger he 
could have accomplished more. But when the fever 

192 



HENRY JAMES 

seizes him, he is convinced that at last he has found his 
proper sphere and that the drama is the real medium 
in which his genius should achieve its destined work- 
ing. "The strange thing is that I always, universally, 
knew this was my more characteristic form — but was 
kept away from it by a half-modest, half-exaggerated 
sense of the difficulty ... of the conditions. But now 
that I have accepted them and met them, I see that 
one isn't at all, needfully, their victim, but is, from the 
moment one is anything, one's self, worth speaking 
of, their master." 48 And he sets himself to be the mas- 
ter triumphantly. He toils more than he ever dreamed 
of toiling on fiction. He studies the secrets of tech- 
nique with which those who think they understand 
the theatre have beguiled so many passionate aspir- 
ants. He has his moments of hope, of confidence, of 
enthusiasm, and portrays them with his customary 
vividness. A fairly successful provincial performance 
cheers him, encourages him. "The passage from 
knock-kneed nervousness (the night of the premiere, 
as one clings in the wings, to the curtain rod, as to the 
pied des autels) to a simmering serenity is especially 
life-saving in its effect." 49 Then things go wrong and 
hope yields to utter disgust. And again, after one 
failure, after two failures, a word of praise, a trifle of 
alluring temptation, seduce him to renewed, more 
strenuous effort. But the end is fatal, inevitable, as 
it has been for so many whom that fascinating siren 
has betrayed to far more complete destruction. Actors 
are patronizing, encroaching, tyrannous, ignorant. 
Audiences are more tyrannous and more ignorant still. 

193 



AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

Let us leave the loathed stage and go back to the quiet 
writing of profound, great fiction, where at least the 
failure is that of indifference and not of audible con- 
tempt. 

Through all this theatrical convulsion a common pre- 
text with James was that he needed money and that the 
theatre was a dazzlingly facile and convenient means of 
getting it. All he cared to give to the stage was " time to 
dig out eight or ten rounded masterpieces and make 
withal enough money to enable me to retire in peace and 
plenty for the unmolested business of a little supreme 
writing as distinguished from gouging." 60 Alas, the 
stage was no more fruitful than other things in this di- 
rection, and it is really pitiful to see that such enormous 
labor and such admirable genius could produce no more 
tangible pecuniary result. But it is clear enough that, 
though money might be the pretext, the passion went 
far deeper than money. Success, triumph, applause, 
in one simple word, glory, were underlying motives 
with James, as with all other artists. He longed, not 
only to do great things, but to have the seal of imme- 
diate wonder and enthusiasm set upon them. And in 
spite of the approval of many of the discerning, few 
writers who have toiled so vastly and worthily have 
received less of universal recognition. 

The fine, the most notable thing through all this com- 
parative failure is the largeness, the sweetness, the dig- 
nity of James's attitude. Such public neglect of a man's 
work is apt to produce sourness and bitterness. With 
him it did not. Criticism he considered thoughtfully 
and estimated wisely. It did not, indeed, often affect 

194 



HENRY JAMES 

his aims or methods. When does it ever? But he showed 
a large charity in entering into the intention of the 
critic, was always ready to allow for other points of 
view than his own. Nor did he often fall into the error 
of so many disappointed authors, that of railing against 
the taste of his contemporaries. He could not always 
resist some rebellion against the triumph of the mediocre, 
could not accept the vogue of the obviously cheap 
and tawdry. But in the main he feels that he writes 
for the few and with the discerning commendation of 
the few he must be satisfied. And his are the admirable 
words of rebuke to those who would revenge their 
ill-success upon the world about them: "Most forms of 
contempt are unwise; but one of them seems to us 
peculiarly ridiculous — contempt for the age one lives 
in." 61 Broad kindliness, thoughtful, earnest, patient 
sincerity, these are not always the distinguishing 
qualities of the artist; in James they were eminently 
and charmingly exemplified. 

In nothing perhaps more than in his tone toward his 
fellow-writers. Here again pretentious emptiness some- 
times wins deserved condemnation. But in the main 
he was largely generous and sympathetic. He had many 
close friends among the authors of his time, friends to 
whom he wrote with the peculiar exquisite tenderness 
of friendship that characterizes his letters. Many of 
these friends were much younger than he and many of 
them quickly passed him in the race for success and 
financial profit. He never resented this, never showed 
any small soreness or grudging. He counseled wisely 
and congratulated warmly and cherished an ever- 

195 



AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

growing affection where in many rivalry would have 
fostered a certain chilliness, if not estrangement. 
Few things of the kind are more touching and pleasing 
than his manly, simple acceptance of the unneces- 
sary and ill-mannered criticism introduced by his near 
friend Mr. Wells into his novel "Boon." 52 

So the long, patient, toilsome life flitted away, 
leaving a huge mass of production behind it, which, 
after all, had perhaps not greatly affected the busy 
world. But with all the toil and all the struggle and all 
the disappointment, few writers have got more sub- 
stantial satisfaction out of the mere doing of their own 
work. The mystery of words and their strange, subtle, 
creative and created relation to thoughts has not 
been fully elucidated yet and perhaps never will be. 
But it is certain that, for the born worker in them, 
they have inexplicable and inexhaustible secrets and 
sources of delight and joy. Who is there who has 
probed these secrets and drained these sources more 
passionately than Henry James? 



VIII 

JOSEPH JEFFERSON 



CHRONOLOGY 

Joseph Jefferson. 

Born, Philadelphia, February 20, 1829. 

Acted at Franklin Theatre, New York, 1837. 

Married Margaret Clements Lockyer, May 19, 1850. 

Made hit as Dr. Pangloss, August 31, 1857. 

In Australia, 1861-1865. 

Appeared as Rip Van Winkle at the Adelphi Theatre, 

London, September 4, 1865. 
Married Sarah Isabel Warren, December 20, 1867. 
Produced The Rivals at the Arch Street Theatre, 

Philadelphia, 1880. 
Published Autobiography, 1889-1890. 
All-Star Rivals Tour, 1896. 
Died, Palm Beach, Florida, April 23, 1905. 




JOSEPH JEFFERSON 



VIII 
JOSEPH JEFFERSON 



Jefferson was not born on the stage, but his fam- 
ily for generations had been associated with the 
theatre. His first appearance that he remembered 
was in 1832, when he was three years old, and he con- 
tinued to act in all sorts of parts and with all sorts of 
experiences almost till his death in 1905. The theatrical 
influence and atmosphere seemed to surround him 
at all times. He grew up with the strange richness 
of wandering Bohemian vagrancy which attaches to 
the profession in the dreams of youth, and he met his 
full share of the hard knocks and bitter struggles which 
the dreams of youth pass over lightly. Also, he had 
something of the easy, gracious temper which en- 
joys the charms of such a life and takes the trials as 
they come. His father had even more of it. When he 
was reduced to total bankruptcy, he went fishing, and 
said to those who found him so occupied: "I have lost 
everything, and I am so poor now that I really cannot 
afford to let anything worry me." * The son inherited 
from his mother a soul of somewhat more substan- 
tial tissue. He did not like bankruptcy and avoided 
it. Yet even he thoroughly savored a nomad life and 
a changing world. He writes of such: "It had a rov- 
ing, joyous, gipsy kind of attraction in it that was 

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AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

irresistible." * It is said that his great-grandmother 
died laughing. 3 He lived laughing, at any rate, or 
smiling, with the tenderest sympathy, at all the strange 
vagaries of existence. To be sure of it, you need only 
study his portraits, that curiously wrinkled face, which 
seems as if generations of laughter had kneaded it to 
the perfect expression of all pathos and all gayety 

The striking thing is that, with this profuse contact 
w T ith every side of human experience, which must have 
included the basest, the most sordid, the most vicious, 
the man should have kept his own nature high and 
pure to a singular degree. Certainly no one was more 
in the world, and in a sense of the world; yet few have 
remained more unspotted by it. He often quoted with 
approval the fine saying, "We cannot change the 
world, but we can keep away from it." 4 He kept away 
from it in spirit. His great friend, President Cleveland, 
said of him: "Many knew how free he was from hatred, 
malice, and uncharitableness, but fewer knew how 
harmonious his qualities of heart, and mind, and con- 
science blended in the creation of an honest, upright, 
sincere, and God-fearing man." 5 And Colonel Watter- 
son, who was intimately acquainted with him, remarks, 
more specifically: "I never knew a man whose moral 
sensibilities were more acute. He loved the respect- 
able. He detested the unclean." 6 

This moral tone was not simply the sanity of a 
wholesome, well-adjusted nature; it was a delicacy, an 
instinctive refinement that rejected the subtler shades 
of coarseness as well as mere brutality. Not that 
Jefferson was the least in the world of a Puritan. The 

200 



JOSEPH JEFFERSON 

suggestion would be laughable. But he avoided the 
obscene as he avoided the ugly. He disliked grossness 
on the stage as he disliked it in the drawing-room, and 
even deliberately asserted that the latter should be a 
criterion for the former, 7 which is perhaps going a 
little far. And he wanted as much decency behind the 
scenes as before. "Booth's theatre," he said, "is con- 
ducted as a theatre should be — like a church behind 
the curtain and like a counting-house in front of it." 8 

He not only avoided the moral looseness of Bohemi- 
anism; he could not tolerate its easy-going indifference 
to artistic method. He reflected deeply and carefully 
on the nature of his art and did not cease to reflect on 
it as long as he practised it. He had definite views as 
to its purpose, and, while we may not agree with those 
views, we must at least recognize their validity for one 
of Jefferson's temperament. Realism he would have 
nothing to do with. Art, he urged, was from its very 
nature selective, suggestive, aimed to give the spiritual 
essence, not the superficial, material detail. Just so far 
as these details served the spirit, they were to be used 
and developed amply; but they were to be disregarded 
altogether, when they threatened to drag down the 
spirit and smother it. 

He gave careful attention to the audience and its 
point of view. The strength of his artistic achievement 
lay both in distinction and in human feeling, but with 
the emphasis rather on human feeling, and he knew it 
and studied the human hearts to which he addressed 
himself. All the human hearts, moreover. He was no 
actor to evening dress and diamonds. How admirable 

201 



AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

is his appeal to Miss Shaw to remember the second 
balcony: "They are just as much entitled to hear and 
see and enjoy as are the persons in the private boxes." 9 

And he reflected and often spoke on the great 
critical problem of whether the actor should act from 
feeling or from intellect. To Jefferson's keen common 
sense the problem was hardly a problem at all. Every 
actor must use feeling and intellect both, the propor- 
tion differing according to the temperament. An 
intense imaginative sympathy with the emotion of the 
character involved must lie at the bottom of every 
successful impersonation. But this imaginative sym- 
pathy must at all times be controlled by clear and 
competent analysis. Surely no actor could have had 
keener sensibilities than had Jefferson himself. Once, 
at a pathetic moment in a part he had played over and 
over again, he was observed to falter, lost himself, 
and the curtain fell abruptly. "I broke down," he 
explained afterwards, "completely broke down. I 
turned away from the audience to recover myself. But 
I could not and had the curtain rung." 10 Yet he was 
commonly self-possessed enough in the most intense 
situations to make comments to his fellow-actors, and 
he summed up the whole question in the often-quoted 
saying, "For myself, I know that I act best when the 
heart is warm and the head is cool." " 

As Jefferson was thorough in analyzing the theory 
of his profession, so he was industrious and conscien- 
tious in the practice of it. Although, in his later years, 
he confined himself to a few parts, he had been in his 
youth an actor of wide range, and he never ceased to 

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JOSEPH JEFFERSON 

study his oft-repeated triumphs for new effects and 
possibilities, was never the man to lie back upon es- 
tablished reputation and forget the toil necessary to 
sustain it. "I learn something about my art every 
night," he said, even in old age. 12 And he not only 
worked, but he worked with method and foresight. He 
suggests in his "Autobiography" that he was careless 
and unreliable as to facts, 13 and perhaps he was in indif- 
ferent matters. But when it came to planning a cam- 
paign, he knew what he was seeking and got it. For he 
was an excellent man of business. So many actors earn 
great sums and let them slip through their fingers. 
Not Jefferson. His ideas of financial management were 
broad and liberal. He put no spite into it and no mean- 
ness. See his excellent remarks on competition and 
opposition. 14 Nor did he desire money for itself. A 
moderate income is enough for him. "Less than this 
may be inconvenient at times; more than this is a 
nuisance." 15 But hard lessons had taught him the 
value of a dollar when he saw it, the pleasure it would 
give and the misery it would save, and when the dollars 
came, he held on to them. 

In his relations with his fellow-actors he appears to 
have been delightful. At least I have looked rather 
widely for fault-finding and have not discovered it. He 
enjoyed practical jokes, as in the case of the exqui- 
sitely dressed dandy whom he had to embrace upon the 
stage: "I held him tight and rumpled his curls, and 
then I heard him murmur, in a tone of positive agony, 
1 Oh, God !' He was not in the least hurt, but he seemed 
to feel that his last hour had come." 16 No doubt 

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AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

Jefferson was tolerant of such jokes when played upon 
him. Also, with his charming frankness, he lays bare 
in himself the weaknesses to which human nature is 
liable. Jealousy? "In this instance my rival was a 
good actor, but not too good to be jealous of me, and 
if our positions had been reversed the chances are that 
I would have been jealous of him." 17 Temper? He 
had temper and showed it, as he illustrates by various 
examples, without excusing himself. Quarrels? They 
occurred in his life, as in most lives, and he admits that 
his part in them was not always creditable. But the 
quarrels were relieved and soon healed by a wide com- 
prehension of the human heart and love of it. And, 
above all, a sane philosophy taught that no quarrel 
should be perpetuated by talking about it or making 
any parade of it whatever. "If people could only 
realize how little the public care for the private quar- 
rels of individuals — except to laugh at them — they 
would hesitate before entering upon a newspaper con- 
troversy." 18 If Whistler could have learned that lesson, 
his life would have been pleasanter to read about. 

And Jefferson's good terms with his fellows were by 
no means confined to the negative. He was always 
ready for a frolic with them. He was cordially inter- 
ested in their affairs. He was willing to give both 
money and time to extricate them from difficulties. 
He could do what is perhaps even harder, bestow 
unstinted and discerning praise upon their achieve- 
ments. And he could stand up for their professional 
dignity, whether they were alive or dead. When a 
fashionable minister refused to perform the funeral 

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JOSEPH JEFFERSON 

service for an actor on account of his calling, Jefferson 
asked in wrath if there was no church where he could 
get it done. "There is a little church around the cor- 
ner," was the reply. "Then, if this be so, God bless 'the 
little church around the corner.' " 19 The name sticks 
to this day. No wonder that a friend who knew him 
intimately could write, "He was the most lovable per- 
son I had ever met either in or out of my profession." 20 

A better test than even relations with the profession 
generally is that of management of the actors in his 
own company and under his especial charge. It is 
evident that he preserved discipline. Irregularities in 
conduct and irregularities in artistic method he would 
not tolerate. But he was reasonable in discipline, and 
he was gentle, as gentle, we are told, with his sub- 
ordinates as with his children and grandchildren. 21 
In strong contrast to actors like Macready and Forrest, 
he had the largest patience in meeting unexpected 
difficulties. One night the curtain dropped in the 
midst of a critical scene. Jefferson accepted the situa- 
tion with perfect calmness. Afterwards he inquired 
the cause of the trouble, and one of the stage-hands 
explained that he had leaned against the button that 
gave the signal. "Well," said Jefferson, "will you 
kindly find some other place to lean to-morrow 
night?" 22 

He was helpful to those about him, and gave advice 
and encouragement when needed, but this was less by 
constant lecturing than by the force and suggestion of 
his own example. You could not be with him without 
learning, if you had one atom of the stuff of success in 

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AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

you. Some great artists daunt and discourage by their 
very presence. Jefferson soothed. When he saw that 
you were anxious and troubled, "he laid his hand on 
your shoulder in that gentle way that stilled all tumult 
in one and made everything easy and possible, saying: 
'It will be all right.'" 23 

It is true that some urged and do still that Jefferson 
wanted all the stage and all the play to himself. At a 
certain point in his career he became a star. After that 
he altered plays to suit his own prominence and at last 
centred practically his whole effort on a very inferior 
piece that happened to be adapted to his temperament 
and gave him enormous professional success. It may 
reasonably be argued that this desire to engross atten- 
tion to himself kept him out of real masterpieces, and 
even more subtly that he had not the genius to make 
himself unquestioned master of those masterpieces. 
On the other hand, his admirers insist that, before he 
became a one-part actor, he appeared in a great variety 
of parts, over a hundred in all, and in most, com- 
petently, if not triumphantly. There is no doubt that 
he himself felt the charges of repetition and self-as- 
sertion, though he could always meet them with his 
charming humor, as when he tells the story of his 
friends' giving him a Christmas present of "The 
Rivals" with all the parts but his own cut out. 24 The 
cleverest thing he ever said as to the lack of variety 
was his answer to Matthews, who charged him with 
making a fortune with one part and a carpet-bag. "It 
is perhaps better to play one part in different ways 
than to play many parts all in one way." 25 And Win- 

206 



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JOSEPH JEFFERSON 

ter's defence against egotism is probably in the main 
justified: "When he was on the stage he liked to be the 
centre of attention ; he liked to have the whole scene to 
himself; but he perfectly well knew the importance of 
auxiliaries and the proportion of component parts to 
make up a symmetrical whole; he could, and when 
needful, he always did completely subordinate himself 
to the requirements of the scene." 26 

But by far the most interesting light on Jefferson's 
view of his own professional methods is to be found in 
the conversation reported by Miss Mary Shaw as to her 
performance of Gretchen in "Rip Van Winkle." Miss 
Shaw had been inclined to emphasize the possibilities 
of tenderness in Gretchen's character, but Jefferson, 
in his infinitely gentle way, put a stop to this immedi- 
ately. "You must not once during the play, except in 
the last act, call the attention of the audience to any 
ordinary rule of conduct or mode of feeling. You must 
play everything with the idea of putting forth this 
central figure Rip Van Winkle, as more and more lov- 
able, the more and more he outrages the sensibilities, 
that being the ethical meaning of the play." 27 And there 
are many other words to the same effect, all admirably 
ingenious and on the whole reasonable. Only I should 
like to have seen Jefferson smile, as he said them. 

Whether he smiled, or whether he was serious, there 
can be no doubt that, with all his gentleness and all his 
humor, he had an immense ambition that stuck by 
him till he died. Over and over again he acknowledges 
this, with his graceful jesting, which covers absolute 
sincerity: "As the curtain descended the first night 

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AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

on that remarkably successful play ["Our American 
Cousin"], visions of large type, foreign countries, and 
increased remuneration floated before me, and I re- 
solved to be a star if I could." 28 Those who think only 
of his later glory do not realize the long years of diffi- 
culty and struggle. His youth knew the plague of 
fruitless effort. He met hunger and cold, deception and 
rejection. His words about failure have the vividness 
of intimate acquaintance with the subject. " If you are 
unsuccessful as a poet, a painter, an architect, or even 
a mechanic, it is only your work that has failed; but 
with the actor it does not end here : if he be condemned, 
it is himself that has failed." 29 And further, "The 
mortification of a personal and public slight is so hard 
to bear that he casts about for any excuse rather than 
lay the blame upon himself." 80 Stage-fright, utter 
distrust of genius and fortune, — he knew it, oh, how 
well he knew it! To the very end he was nervous over 
the chance of some sudden incapacity or untoward 
accident. "I am always attacked with a nervous fit 
when I am to meet a new assemblage of actors and 
actresses." Z1 And he said to an amateur who asked 
him for a cure for such feelings, "If you find one, I 
wish you would let me have it." 32 

He was as sensitive to applause and appreciation as 
to failure. When words of approval began to come, 
they were drunk in with eagerness. "How anxious I 
used to be in the morning to see what the critic said, 
quickly scanning the article and skipping over the 
praise of the other actors, so as to get to what they 
said about me." 83 And years did not abate the zest or 

208 



JOSEPH JEFFERSON 

dull the edge of it. To be sure, he liked discretion in 
compliments, as did Doctor Johnson, who said to 
Hannah More, "Madam, before you flatter a man so 
grossly to his face, you should consider whether your 
flattery is worth his having." Jefferson's method was 
gentler. To a lady who hailed him as "You dear, great 
man!" he answered, "Madam, you make me very 
uncomfortable." 34 But when the compliments were 
deftly managed, he liked them. "He was susceptible 
to honest admiration," says Mr. Wilson. "I have 
often heard liim declare since, that he would not give 
the snap of his finger for anybody who was not." 35 
And when the compliment came, not from an individ- 
ual, but from a vast audience, he found it uplifting, 
exhilarating beyond most things on earth. This stimu- 
lus was so splendid, so out of normal experience, that, 
with his mystical bent, he was inclined to relate it to 
some magnetic agency. "He claimed," says Miss 
Shaw, "that what he gave the audience in nervous 
force, in artistic effort, in inspiration, he received back 
in full measure, pressed down and running over. . . . 
And how well I saw this great truth demonstrated by 
Mr. Jefferson. Every night this delicate old man, after 
having been virtually on the stage every moment for 
hours in a play he had acted for thirty-seven years, and 
which therefore of itself afforded him little or no in- 
spiration, would come off absolutely refreshed instead 
of exhausted." 36 

Few human beings have had more opportunity to 
drink the cup of immediate triumph to the bottom. 
Jefferson himself often enlarged upon the ephemeral 

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AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

quality of the actor's glory. No doubt the thought of 
this gave added poignancy to his rendering of the 
celebrated phrase in "Rip Van Winkle," "Are we so 
soon forgot when we are gone!" 37 And he urged that 
it was but just that this glory, being so brief, should be 
immense and fully savored. He savored it, with perfect 
appreciation of its casual elements, but still he savored 
it with large and long delight. He recognized fully that 
his lot had been fortunate, and that, although he had 
had to toil for success, he had achieved it. "I have 
always been a very contented man whatever hap- 
pened," he said, "and I think I have had good reason 
to be." 38 He recognized also in his triumph the sub- 
stantial quality which comes from normal growth; as 
he beautifully phrased it, "that sweet and gradual 
ascent to good fortune that is so humanizing." 3 * 
Respect, tenderness, appreciation, from young and old, 
rich and poor, wise and unwise, flowed about his ripe 
age and mellowed it, and he acknowledged them again 
and again in most touching words. " It has been dear 
to me — this life of illuminated emotion — and it has 
been so magnificently repaid. ... I have been doubly 
repaid by the sympathetic presence of the people when 
I was playing, and the affection that seems to follow 
me, like the sunshine streaming after a man going 
down the forest trail that leads over the hills to the 
lands of morning. No, I can't put it in words." 40 
Then he added, with the whimsical turn which gave 
his talk so much of its charm, "Perhaps it's a good 
thing to quit the stage before the people have a chance 
to change their minds about me." 41 

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JOSEPH JEFFERSON 

As is well known, the climax of Jefferson's fortunate 
career lay in the discovery of "Rip Van Winkle," not 
of course as a new play, but as something perfectly 
suited to Jefferson himself. His whole account of this 
discovery, of the first suggestion on a haymow in a 
country barn on a rainy day, of the gradual growth of 
the piece and its final triumph, is extremely curious. 42 
Equally curious is the study of the play itself. As read, 
it appears to be crude, inept, inadequate, illiterate. It 
is not that the language is simple. Much of it is not 
simple, but heavily, commonly pretentious, with that 
conventionality which is as foreign to life as it is to 
good writing. Yet Jefferson took this infirm, tottering 
patch of literary ineptitude and by sheer artistic skill 
made it a human masterpiece. When the play was first 
produced in England, Boucicault, the author, ex- 
pressed his doubts as to Jefferson's handling of it: 
"Joe, I think you are making a mistake: you are shoot- 
ing over their heads." Jefferson answered: "I'm not 
even shooting at their heads — I'm shooting at their 
hearts." a He did not miss his mark. 

ii 

So much for the actor. In studying him we have had 
glimpses of the man, but he deserves to be developed 
much more fully. First, as to intelligence. His shrewd- 
ness, his keenness, his acute insight into life and human 
nature appear in every record of him. He understood 
men and women, read their tempers, their desires, their 
hopes and fears; no doubt largely by his own, as is the 
surest way. ^For he made a constant, careful, and 

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AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

clear-sighted analysisof himself. Few persons have con- 
fided to us their observations in this kind with more 
winning candor. That is, when he sees fit. His" Auto- 
biography" is not a psychological confession and deals 
intentionally with the external. But the glimpses of 
inner life that he does give have a singular clarity. He 
admitted his merits, if we may accept the account of 
Mr. Wilson, whose conversations with him generally 
bear the strongest mark of spiritual veracity. " You 
always do the right thing," said Mr. Wilson. "Well," 
said Jefferson modestly, " I believe I make fewer mis- 
takes than most men. I think I am tactful rather than 
politic, the difference between which is very great." 44 
I find this a little hard to swallow. But Jefferson's 
ample admission of his faults and weaknesses is appar- 
ent everywhere and is really charming. He agrees to 
accept a role to please a friend: "I did so, partly to 
help my old partner, and partly to see my name in 
large letters. This was the first time I had ever enjoyed 
that felicity, and it had a most soothing influence upon 
me." 45 He sees a rival actor and appreciates his ex- 
cellence, "though I must confess that I had a hard 
struggle even inwardly to acknowledge it. As I look 
back and call to mind the slight touch of envy that I 
felt that night, I am afraid that I had hoped to see 
something not quite so good, and was a little annoyed 
to find him such a capital actor ." 46 All actors and all 
men feel these things; not all have the honesty to say 
them. 

Also, Jefferson's vivacity and activity of spirit made 
him widely conversant with many subjects. "I never 

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JOSEPH JEFFERSON 

discussed any topic of current interest or moment with 
him," says Colonel Watterson, "that he did not throw 
upon it the side-lights of a luminous understanding, 
and at the same time an impartial and intelligent judg- 
ment." 47 It must not be supposed, however, that he 
was a profound or systematic thinker, and his acquaint- 
ance with books, though fairly wide, was somewhat 
superficial. Even Shakespeare, whom he worshiped 
and introduced constantly into discussion and argu- 
ment, he had never read through. 

The truth is, he was too busy living to read. He 
relished life, in all its forms and energies. He was fond 
of sport, and entered into it with boyish ardor. His 
love of fishing is widely known, because it figured in 
his relation with President Cleveland. Their hearty 
comradeship is well illustrated by the pleasant anec- 
dote of Cleveland's waiting impatiently while Jeffer- 
son chatted at his ease with the commander of the 
Oneida. "Are you going fishing or not?" called out 
the President in despair. "I do not mean to stir until I 
have finished my story to the Commodore," said the 
actor. 48 Jefferson sometimes shot as well as fished. 
But in later years the gun was too much for his natural 
tenderness. "I don't shoot any more," he said; "I 
can't bear to see the birds die." 49 And it is character- 
istic that to an interviewer, who had ventured some 
casual comment on the subject, he remarked later, 
"You said you didn't like to kill things! It made such 
an impression on me that I've never been shooting 
since." 50 

Jefferson would have been even more absorbed in 

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AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

sport if he had not had another distraction which fas- 
cinated him and took most of the time and strength 
that he could spare from his regular pursuits. From 
his childhood he loved to paint. His father did a good 
deal of scene-painting and the son, hardly out of 
infancy, would get hold of the father's colors and busy 
himself with them for hours. The passion endured and 
grew, and Jefferson even felt that, if he had not been 
an actor, he would have been a painter and a success- 
ful one. His work, mostly landscapes, shows the grace, 
sensibility, and subtle imaginative quality of his 
temperament as well as the influence of the great 
French painters whom he so much admired. 

But what interests us about Jefferson's painting is 
the hold it had upon him and the zeal with which he 
threw himself into it at all times. When he was at 
home, he shut himself into his studio and worked. 
When he was touring the country, and acting regularly, 
"in the early morning — at half-past six or so — he 
would be heard calling for his coffee and for his palette 
and brushes. It was very hard to get any conversation 
out of him during the day that did not in some way 
lead up to painting." 51 This is one of the curious 
cases of a man with a genius for one form of art, 
possessed with the desire to excel in another. When 
asked if it were true that he would rather paint than 
act, he replied it most emphatically was. 52 At any 
rate, there can be no question that painting filled his 
thoughts almost as much as acting. When he was in 
Paris, he says, " I painted pictures all day and dreamed 
of them all night." 53 He cherished the hope that after 

214 



JOSEPH JEFFERSON 

his death his paintings would be prized and sought for, 
and he fondly instanced Corot, whose work did not 
begin to sell till he was fifty. 54 A scene of natural 
beauty always translated itself for him into a picture. 
One day, when he had been admiring such a scene, a 
friend said to him, "Why don't you paint it?" "No, 
no, no! Not now." "And when?" "Oh, sometime in 
the future — when I have forgotten it." 55 But the 
most charming comment on this pictorial passion is the 
little dialogue between Cleveland and Jefferson on the 
morning after Cleveland was nominated for the second 
time. Jefferson was standing at a window at Gray 
Gables, looking out over the Bay. Cleveland put a 
hand on his shoulder. "Joe," he said, "aren't you 
going to congratulate me?" And Jefferson: "Ah, I 
do! Believe me, I do congratulate you. But, good God, 
if I could paint like that, you could be president of a 
dozen United States and I wouldn't change places 
with you." 56 

The drawback to painting, at least in Jefferson's 
case, was that it was a solitary pleasure. It was only 
when alone that artistic ideas would come to him. 57 
He commented on this with his usual delicate wit. 
"But if I like to be alone when I paint, I have no ob- 
jection to a great many people when I act." 58 And in 
general he had no objection to a great many people, 
liked them in fact, and was a thoroughly social and 
human being. He had all the qualities of a peculiarly 
social temperament. "He was full of caprices," says 
Winter; "mercurial and fanciful; a creature of moods; 
exceedingly, almost morbidly sensitive; eagerly desir- 

215 



AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

ous to please, because he loved to see people happy." 59 
He could enter into the happiness of others, and 
quite as keenly into their distress. He was "sensible 
of the misfortunes and sufferings of the lame, the 
blind, the deaf, and the wretched." 60 He not only felt 
these things and relieved them with words, with coun- 
sel, and with sympathy; but he was ready and active 
with deeds, both in the way of effort and in the way of 
money. With the shrewdness of a Franklin, he saw 
the subjective as well as the objective benefit of such 
action. "My boys sometimes get discouraged," he 
remarked, "and I say to them: 'Go out and do some- 
thing for somebody. Go out and give something to 
anybody, if it's only a pair of woolen stockings to a 
poor old woman. It will take you away from your- 
selves and make you happy.'" 61 He was sometimes 
spoken of as over-careful in money matters. Certainly 
he was not careless or wasteful. He knew that common 
sense applies to giving as to other things, and he was 
not liable to the reproach implied in his comment on a 
fellow-actor: "It was said of him that he was generous 
to a fault; and I think he must have been, for he never 
paid his washerwoman." * 2 Jefferson paid his own 
washerwoman, before he helped other people's. 

In human traits of a less practical order he was even 
richer. In company he was cordial, gay, sympathetic, 
amusing. He was an admirable story-teller, acted his 
narrative as well as spoke it, apologized for repeating 
himself, as good story-tellers too often do not, but 
made old anecdotes seem new by the freshness of his 
invention in detail. He was tolerant of the talk of 

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JOSEPH JEFFERSON 

others, even of bores, even of impertinent interviewers, 
and all agree that he was an excellent listener. He knew 
that in our hurried, ignorant world those who listen 
are those who learn. 

In the more intimate relations of life Jefferson's 
tenderness was always evident. He was twice married 
and had children by both wives and his family life was 
full of charm. I do not know that this can be better 
illustrated than by his daughter-in-law's story of his 
once enlarging upon the hideousness of the old idea of 
God as jealous and angry. This, he said, violated all 
the beauty of the true relation between parent and 
child. Whereupon one of his sons remarked, "You 
never taught us to be afraid of you, father." 63 Jeffer- 
son's affection for those who were gone seems to have 
had a peculiar tenacity and loyalty. Of his elder half- 
brother, Charles, especially, he always spoke with such 
vivid feeling that you felt that the memory was a 
clinging presence in his life. 

His devotion to the friends who were with him in the 
flesh was equally sincere and attractive. The relation 
with the Clevelands naturally commands the most 
attention, and it is as creditable to one side as to the 
other. Jefferson understood perfectly his friend's great 
position in the world. He was absolutely indifferent to 
it, so far as the free, intimate commerce of daily inter- 
course went ; yet never for one instant did he presume 
upon it for any purpose of self-exaltation or self- 
aggrandizement. I do not know where this is more 
delightfully illustrated than in the words of Gilder, the 
close friend of both men, writing to Mrs. Cleveland: 

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AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

"I have just spent the night at Joseph Jefferson's; 
he was as angelic as ever, and speaks of yourself and 
the President always with that refinement of praise 
that honors the praised doubly — with that deep 
respect mingled with an affectionate tone, free of 
familiarity, that makes one feel like taking off one's 
hat whenever he says ' the President ' or Mrs. ' Cleve- 
land.'" 64 

The same sensibility that marks Jefferson's human 
relations shows in all his enjoyment of life. He liked 
pleasant things, pretty things. He was moderate in 
his eating, but he appreciated good food in good com- 
pany. He liked to build houses and fill them with what 
was charming. He was too shrewd to be lavish, too 
shrewd to think that lavishness makes happiness. 
But he knew how to select the beautiful with delicacy 
and grace. He loved music, though here his taste was 
rather simple, and he quoted with relish "Bill" Nye's 
remark about Wagner, "My friend Wagner's music is 
really much better than it sounds." 65 He adored 
painting, studied it closely, and collected it as exten- 
sively as his means would allow, at times perhaps a 
little more so. His love for nature has already appeared 
with his painting. It was inexhaustible, and one of the 
best things Winter ever said about him was, "No 
other actor has expressed in art, as he did, the spirit of 
humanity in intimate relation with the spirit of physi- 
cal nature." 66 

The sensitive and emotional quality that belonged 
to his aesthetic feeling was very evident in Jefferson's 
religious attitude. It does not appear that he had done 

218 



JOSEPH JEFFERSON 

any elaborate or systematic thinking upon such sub- 
jects and he did not trouble himself greatly with the 
external formalities of religion. "For sectarian creeds 
he entertained a profound contempt," says Winter, 
"and upon clergymen, as a class, he looked with dis- 
trust and aversion." 67 But he had an instinctive lean- 
ing toward a spiritual view of life. Immortality was 
not only a theory with him, but an actual, vivid fact; 
so that he seemed constantly to feel about him the 
presence of those whom he had lost. In this he re- 
sembled the Swedenborgians, to whose doctrines he 
was favorable, without perhaps knowing much about 
them. He carried his receptiveness for spiritual phe- 
nomena to the verge of credulity, at the same time 
always tingeing and correcting it with his wholesome 
humor and irony. Once he came into the company of 
Cleveland just as some other person present was tell- 
ing something a little difficult for ordinary minds to 
swallow. "Ah,'' cried Cleveland, "tell that to Jeffer- 
son: he'll believe anything." And Jefferson answered, 
"Of course I will. The world is full of wonders, and 
another, more or less, does not surprise me." 68 

What is winning about Jefferson's religion is its 
cheerfulness, serenity, and love. To be as happy as 
possible one's self and especially to make others happy, 
was the cardinal doctrine of it, and I do not know that 
it can be improved upon. Above all, he was an enemy 
to fear. He told Miss Shaw "that everything that was 
detrimental either to the physical or the spiritual 
health of humanity had its origin in fear. And this he 
believed in casting out entirely. ... He told me that 

219 



AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

he had labored for years with this end in view, believ- 
ing that the conquering of fear would harmonize his 
character as much as it was possible for him to do." 69 
Evidently there was some struggle about this, and 
the interest of Jefferson's cheerfulness and optimism 
lies largely in the fact that they were not a matter of 
temperament, but a matter of will. His was not the 
easy-going, Bohemian carelessness, which takes for- 
tune and misfortune with equal indifference. He liked 
joy and laughter and sought them and cultivated them. 
But he was sensitive and capable of suffering intensely. 
There was a strain of melancholy in him, all the more 
subtle for being controlled. When some one classed 
him as an optimist, he protested: "No — no, he is mis- 
taken, I am not an optimist. I too often let things 
sadden me." 70 Ugliness he hated. Decay he hated. 
"I cannot endure destruction of any kind." 71 Old age 
he hated, never would admit that he was old, kept his 
heart youthful, at any rate. The secret of life, he knew T , 
is looking forward, and he filled his spirit full of the 
things that look forward, to this life or another. Thus 
it was that he loved gardens and flowers. " The saddest 
thing in old age," he said to Mr. Wilson, "is the ab- 
sence of expectation. You no longer look forward to 
things. Now a garden is all expectation" — here his 
thought took the humorous turn so characteristic of 
him — "and you often get a lot of things you don't 
expect." Then he returned to the serious. "Therefore 
I have become a gardener. My boy, when you are past 
seventy, don't forget to cultivate a garden. It is all 
expectation." n 

220 



JOSEPH JEFFERSON 

This delightful blending of laughter and pathos, of 
tenderness and irony, coupled with Jefferson's con- 
stant association with the stage, makes one connect 
him irresistibly with the clowns of Shakespeare. 
Touchstone and Feste and the fool of Lear are not 
fools in the ordinary sense. Their keenness, their ap- 
prehension, their subtlety are often, in specific cases, 
much beyond those of common mortals. It is simply 
that they take with seriousness matters which the chil- 
dren of this world think trifling and see as trifles under 
the haunting aspect of eternity those solemn passions 
and efforts which grave human creatures regard as the 
important interests of life. With this airy, gracious, 
fantastic temper Jefferson had always something in 
common, however practical he might be when a com- 
pelling occasion called for it. He loved dolls, and toy- 
shops, would spend hours in them, watching the chil- 
dren and entering into their ecstasy. He would stand 
before the windows and put chatter into the dolls' 
mouths. "Look at that old fool taking up his time 
staring and laughing at us. I wonder if he thinks we 
have no feelings." "Isn't this a sloppy sort of day for 
dolls? Not even fit to look out of the window!" 
"Hello, Margery, who tore your skirt?" 73 Don't you 
hear Touchstone? Don't you hear Rip Van Winkle? 
"At New Orleans," he said to Mr. Wilson, "Eugene 
Field and I ranged through the curiosity shops, and 
the man would buy dolls and such things." And Wilson 
told him that "Field said he never saw a man like 
Jefferson — that his eye was caught with all sorts of 
gewgaws, and that he simply squandered money on 

221 



AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

trifles." And Jefferson chuckled, "That's it: one half 
the world thinks the other half crazy." 74 

So the solution and dissolution of all life, with its 
passion and effort and despair and hope, in quaint and 
tender laughter bring Jefferson fully into the company 
of the children of dream. Mark Twain, with his vast 
wandering, his quest of fortune, his touching of all 
men's hands and hearts, was a thing of dream, and 
confessed it. Emily Dickinson, shut off in her white 
Amherst solitude, daughter of thoughts and flowers, 
was a thing of dream, and knew it. With Jefferson the 
very nature of stage life made the dream even more 
insistent and pervading. And on the stage to act one 
part, over and over, till the identities of actor and 
acted were mingled inseparably! And to have that 
part Rip Van Winkle, a creature of dream, if ever 
human being was! 

And Jefferson himself recognized this flavor of 
dream again and again. He liked the strange, the 
mysterious, the mystical, preferred to seek the expla- 
nation of natural things in supernatural causes. The 
actor's glory, so immense, so all-involving for a mo- 
ment, does it not flit away into oblivion, like a bubble 
or a dream? Trifles all, toys all, diversions of dolls, and 
fit for dolls to play with! "Is anything worth while?" 
he said. "What, perhaps, does the best or worst any 
of us can do amount to in this vast conglomeration 
of revolving worlds? On the other hand, isn't every- 
thing worth while? Is not the smallest thing of im- 
portance?" 75 So he mocked and meditated, as Feste 
might have done in the gardens of Olivia, while Sir 

222 



JOSEPH JEFFERSON 

Toby drank, and Viola and Orsino caressed and kissed. 
He loved to sum up his own and all life in a phrase of 
Seneca: "Life is like a play upon the stage; it signifies 
nothow long it lasts, but how well it is acted. Die when 
or where you will, think only on making a good exit." 76 
But I am sure, if he had known them, he would have 
preferred the magnificent lines with which Fitzgerald 
ends his translation of the great dream play of Calderon : 

"Such a doubt 
Confounds and clouds our mortal life about. 
And, whether wake or dreaming, this I know, 
How dream- wise human glories come and go; 
Whose momentary tenure not to break, 
Walking as one who knows he soon may wake, 
So fairly carry the full cup, so well 
Disordered insolence and passion quell, 
That there be nothing after to upbraid 
Dreamer or doer in the part he played, 
Whether To-morrow's dawn shall break the spell, 
Or the Last Trumpet of the eternal Day, 
When Dreaming with the Night shall pass away.'\; 



THE OTHER VOLUMES 

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NOTES 

The notes to each chapter are preceded by a list of the most 
important works referred to, with the abbreviations used. 

I: MARK TWAIN 

Paine, Albert Bigelow, Mark Twain; A Biography, 
three volumes, paged continuously. Biography. 

Twain, Mark, Letters, arranged with comment by 
Albert Bigelow Paine, two volumes, paged contin- 
uously. Letters, 

Twain, Mark, Works, Hillcrest Edition, twenty-five 
volumes. (This edition is not complete, but is 
quoted for all writings contained in it.) Works. 

1. Letters, p. 128. 

2. Letters, p. 643. 

3. Biography, p. 241. 

4. Biography, p. 146. 

5. Biography, p. 109. 

6. Works, vol. vi, p. 234. 

7. Letters, p. 416. 

8. Biography, p. 1328. 

9. Letters, p. 734. 

10. Biography, p. 1256. 

11. Biography, p. 773. 

12. Letters, p. 543. 

j 13. Works, vol. v, p. 119. 

14. Mark Twain, Autobiography, in North American Review, 

vol. clxxxv, p. 121. 

15. W. D. Howells, My Mark Twain, p. 178. 

16. Biography, p. 844. 

17. Mark Twain, Autobiography, in North American Review, 

vol. clxxxv, p. 5. 

18. Biography, p. 1366. 

19. Works, vol. xm, p. 279. 

20. Mark Twain, What is Man and Other Essays, p. 75. 

21. Letters, p. 337. 

227 



AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

22. Biography, p. 1451. 

23. Letters, p. 527. 

24. Mark Twain, Autobiography, in North American Review, 

vol. clxxxiii, p. 457. 

25. Letters, p. 528. 

26. Mark Twain, Speeches, p. 32. 

27. Mark Twain, Autobiography, in North American Review, 

vol. clxxxiii, p. 583. 

28. Mark Twain, The Mysterious Stranger, p. 150. 

29. Biography, p. 1292. 

II: HENRY ADAMS 

Adams, Henry, The Education of Henry Adams; 

An Autobiography. Education. 

Adams, Henry, Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres. Saint-MicheL 

1. Education, p. 314. 

2. Education, p. 68. 

3. Education, p. 9. 

4. Education, p. 34. 

5. Education, p. 64. 

6. Education, p. 59. 

7. Education, p. 66. 

8. Education, p. 56. 

9. Education, p. 65. 

10. Education, p. 70. 

11. Education, p. 76. 

12. Education, p. 77. 

13. Education, p. 78. 

14. Education, p. 79. 

15. Education, p. 75. 

16. Education, p. 81. 

17. Henry Cabot Lodge, £ar/# Memories, p. 186. 

18. Education, p. 300. 

19. Jfo'd. 

20. Education, p. 307. 

21. William Roscoe Thayer, 77ie L*/e and Letters of John 

Hay, vol. n, p. 55. 

22. William Roscoe Thayer, The Life and Letters of John 

Hay, vol. n, p. 61. 

228 



NOTES 

23. Education, p. 105. 

24. Education, p. 118. 

25. Ibid. 

26. Education, p. 307. 

27. Education, p. 85. 

28. Education, p. 353. 

29. Saint-Michel, p. 198. 

30. Education, p. 443. 

31. Education, p. 106. 

32. Education, p. 108. 

33. Henry Adams, Letters to a Niece, p. 4. 

34. Henry Adams, Letters to a Niece, p. 16. 

35. Education, p. 170. 

36. Education, p. 175. 

37. Preface to A Letfer to American Teachers of History, in 

The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma, p. 138. 

38. Education, p. 394, - 

39. Education, p. 90. 

40. Ibid. 

41. Education, p. 285. 

42. Education, p. 351. 

43. Education, p. 413. 

44. Education, p. 357. 

45. Education, p. 420. 

46. Education, p. 220. 

47. Saint-Michel, p. 213. 

48. Saint-Michel, p. 178. 

49. Education, p. 232. 

50. Education, p. 68. 

51. Education, p. 255. 

52. Education, p. 369. 

53. Saint-Michel, p. 9. 

54. Education, p. 81. 

55. Letters to a Niece, p. 18. 

56. Saint-Michel, p. 166. 

57. Education, p. 352. 

58. Education, p. 424. 

59. Education, p. 381. 

60. Saint-Michel, p. 111. 

61. Education, p. 95. 

229 



AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

62. Education, p. 441. 

63. Beth Bradford Gilchrist, The Life of Mary Lyon, p. 198. 

Ill: SIDNEY LANIER 

Lanier, Sidney, Letters. Letters. 

Lanier, Sidney, Poems (edition 1900). Poems. 

Mims, Edwin, Sidney Lanier. Mims. 

1. Letters, p. 14 (condensed). 

2. Letters, p. 114. 

3. Mims, p. 153. 

4. To Northrupp, June 11, 1866, in LippincotVs Magazine, 

vol. lxxv, p. 307. 

5. Mims, p. 5. 

6. Mims, p. 321. 

7. Letters, p. 51. 

8. The Letters of Thomas Gray (ed. Tovey), vol. i, p. 150. 

9. Letters, p. 132. 

10. Mims, p. 157. 

11. Mims, p. 91. 

12. Letters, p. 46. 

13. Ibid. 

14. Mims, p. 321. 

15. Mims, p. 125. 

16. Poems, p. xxii. 

17. To Northrupp, July 28, 1866, in LippincotVs Magazine, 

vol. lxxv, p. 310. 

18. Letters, p. 79. 

19. Letters, p. 73. 

20. Mims, p. 39. 

21. Mims, p. 303. 

22. Mims, p. 31. 

23. Letters, p. 103. 

24. Ibid. 

25. Sidney Lanier, Poem Outlines, p. 18. 

26. Mims, p. 96. 

27. Letters, p. 154. 

28. Letters, p. 77. 

29. Sidney Lanier, Retrospects and Prospects, p. 5. 

30. Poems, p. 143. 

230 



NOTES 

31. Sidney Lanier, Poem Outlines, p. 104. 

32. Letters, p. 168. 

33. Letters, p. 194. 

34. Letters, p. 13. 

35. Letters, p. 226. 

36. Letters, p. 50. 

37. Minis, p. 6. 

38. Letters, p. 107. 

39. Mims, p. 310. 

40. Letters, p. 184. 

41. Mims, p. 35. 

42. Letters, p. 171.' 

43. Mims, p. 66. 

44. Letters, p. 71. 

45. Letters, p. 84. 

46. Letters, p. 133. 

47. Mims, p. 308. 

48. Letters, p. 224. 

49. Letters, p. 106. 

50. Ibid. 

51. Letters, p. 109. 

52. Letters, p. 68. 

53. Mims, p. 330. 

54. Mims, p. 145. 

55. Letters, p. 66. 

56. Letters, p. 238. 

57. Poems, p. 31. 

58. Letters, p. 78. 

59. Poems, p. 246. 

IV: JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER 

Menpes, Mortimer, Whistler as I Knew Him. Menpes. 

Pennell, E. R. and J., The Life of James McNeill 

Whistler, sixth edition, revised. Pennell. 

Seitz, Don Carlos, Whistler Stories. Seitz. 

Whistler, James McNeill, The Gentle Art of Making 

Enemies. Gentle Art, 

1. Seitz, p. 27. 

2. Seitz, p. 70. 

231 



AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

3. Menpes, p. 63. 

4. Pennell, p. 358. 

5. Pennell, p. 412. 

6. Gentle Art, p. 29. 

7. Pennell, p. 404. 

8. Pennell, p. 138. 

9. Frederick Keppel, One Day with Whistler, p. 8. 

10. Menpes, p. 8. 

11. Pennell, p. 323. 

12. Menpes, p. 7. 

13. Gilbert K. Chesterton, Heretics, p. 244. 

14. Menpes, p. 140. 

15. Menpes, p. 43. 

16. Menpes, p. 38. 

17. Pennell, p. 343. 

18. Otto H. Bacher, With Whistler in Venice, p. 157. 

19. Chris Healy, Confessions of a Journalist, p. 203. 

20. Pennell, p. 237. 

21. Trilby, in Harper's New Monthly Magazine, vol. lxxxviii, 

p. 577. 

22. Pennell, p. 211. 

23. Menpes, p. 132. 

24. Pennell, p. 366. 

25. Seitz, p. 73. 

26. John G. Van Dyke, American Painting and Its Tradition, 

p. 173. 

27. Alexander Harrison quoted by Frank Harris, Contempo- 

rary Portraits, p. 80. 

28. Pennell, p. 105. 

29. Menpes, p. 37. 

30. Pennell, p. 205. So in first edition, somewhat altered in 

sixth. 

31. Menpes, p. 10. 

32. Menpes, p. 33. 

33. Pennell, p. 104. 

34. Pennell, p. 119. 

35. Pennell, p. 323. 

36. Menpes, p. 117. 

37. John C. Van Dyke, American Painting and Its Tradition, 

p. 173. 

232 



NOTES 

38. Seitz, p. 33. 

39. Seitz, p. 45. 

40. Gentle Art, p. 115. 

41. Pennell, p. 409. 

42. Sir Walter Raleigh, Speech at Opening of Whistler Me- 

morial Exhibition, p. 10. 

43. Menpes, p. 10. 

44. Pennell, p. 285. 

45. Pennell, p. 422. 

46. Pennell, p. 300. 

47. Pennell, p. 277. 

48. T. Martin Wood, Whistler, p. 20. 

49. Pennell, p. 117. 

50. J. K. Huysmans, Certains, p. 69. 

51. Pennell, p. 222. 

52. Seitz, p. 119. 

53. Pennell, p. 284. 

54. Pennell, p. 402. 

55. Seitz, p. 120. 

V: JAMES GILLESPIE BLAINE 

Blaine, Mrs. James G., Letters, edited by Harriet 

S. Blaine Beale, two volumes. Mrs. Blaine. 

Conwell, R. H., The Life and Public Services of 
James G. Blaine. Conwell. 

Hamilton, Gail, Biography of James G. Blaine. Hamilton. 

Stanwood, Edward, James Gillespie Blaine. Stanwood. 

The letters to Warren Fisher, Jr., are printed in full 
in Mr. Blaine* s Record : The Investigation of 1876 
and The Mulligan Letters, Published by the Com- 
mittee of One Hundred. (Boston.) 

1. Mrs. Blaine, vol. n, p. 214. 

2. Hamilton, p. 492. 

3. Mrs. Blaine, vol. n, p. 218. 

4. Mrs. Blaine, vol. i, p. 136. 

5. Hamilton, p. 469. 

6. Hamilton, p. 301. 

7. Conwell, p. 392. 

8. Conwell, p. 89. 

233 



AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

9. Hamilton, p. 620. 

10. Mrs. Blaine, vol. i, p. 303. 

11. Hamilton, p. 532. 

12. Mrs. Blaine, vol. n, p. 36. 

13. Mrs. Blaine, vol. n, p. 121. 

14. Mrs. Blaine, vol. n, p. 135. 

15. Mrs. Blaine, vol. n, p. 183. 

16. Mrs. Blaine, vol. n, p. 185. Sentences transposed. 

17. Mrs. Blaine, vol. n, p. 220. 

18. Mrs. Blaine, vol. n, p. 131. 

19. Mrs. Blaine, vol. n, p. 16. 

20. Mrs. Blaine, vol. i, p. 191. 

21. Hamilton, p. 455. 

22. Hamilton, p. 225. 

23. Hamilton, p. 245. 

24. Hamilton, p. 467. 

25. Hamilton, p. 300. 

26. Mrs. Blaine, vol. i, p. 185. 
27 Hamilton, p. 536. 

28. George F. Hoar, Autobiography of Seventy Years, vol. i, 

p. 378. 

29. Andrew Dickson White, Autobiography, vol. i, p. 214. 

30 George F. Hoar, Autobiography of Seventy Years, vol. i, 

p. 200. 

31 Hamilton, p. 707. 

32 Stanwood, p. 109. 

33. James Ford Rhodes, History of the United States from 

Hayes to McKinley, p. 321. 

34. Mrs. Blaine, vol. i, p. 292. 

35. Conwell, p. 67. 

36. Conwell, p. 86. 

37. Hamilton, p. 436. 

38. A neighbor of Blaine's, in Conwell, p. 87. 

39. Hamilton, p. 107. 

40. Hamilton, p. 581. 

41. Hamilton, p. 147. 

42. George F. Hoar, Autobiography of Seventy Years, vol. i, 

p. 200. 

43. Mrs. Blaine, vol. i, p. 137. 

44. Stanwood, p. 361. 

234 



NOTES 

45. Hamilton, p. 633. 

46. Note in Mrs. Blaine, vol. n, p. 13. 

47. Mrs. Blaine, vol. i, p. 277. 

48. Hamilton, p. 477. 

49. Mrs. Blaine, vol. i, p. 72. 

50. Mrs. Blaine, vol. i, p. 159. 

51. To Fisher, October 1, 1871. 

52. To Fisher, August 9, 1872. 

53. To Fisher, October 4, 1869. 

54. To Fisher, June 29, 1869. 

55. Fisher to Blaine, April 16, 1872. 

56. Stanwood, p. 162. 

57. Enclosure in Blaine to Fisher, April 16, 1876. 

58. Speech of April 24, 1876. In Congressional Record, Forty- 

Fourth Congress, 1st Session, vol. iv, part 3, p. 2725. 

59. Hamilton, p. 395. 

60. James Russell Lowell, Letters, vol. n, p. 170. 

61. James Ford Rhodes, History of the United States from the 

Compromise of 1850, vol. vn, p. 205. 

62. George F. Hoar, Autobiography of Seventy Years, vol. I, 

p. 281. 

63. Hamilton, p. 432. 

64. Congressional Record, June 5, 1876, Forty-Fourth Con- 
fe gress, 1st Session, vol. iv, part 4, p. 3606. 

65. Hamilton, p. 424. 

66. Hamilton, p. 536. 

67. Stanwood, p. 342. 

68. James G. Blaine, Political Discussions, p. 465. 

69. Mrs. Blaine, vol. n, p. 120. For a curious discussion of the 

attitude of Mrs. Blaine toward the possibility of her 
husband's nomination in a later campaign see These 
Shifting Scenes, by Charles Edward Russell, chapter vn. 

VI: GROVER CLEVELAND 

Black, Chauncey F., The Lives of Grover Cleve- . 

land and Thomas A. Hendricks, Black. 

Cleveland, Grover, Fishing and Shooting 

Sketches. Fishing Sketches, 

Cleveland, Grover, The Writings and Speeches 

235 



AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

of Grover Cleveland, Selected and edited by 

George F. Parker. Writings, 

Gilder, Richard Watson, Grover Cleveland; A 
Record of Friendship. Gilder. 

Parker, George F., Recollections of Grover Cleve- 
land. Parker. 

West, Andrew F., article in Century, volume 
lxxvii, January, 1909, Grover Cleveland: A 
Princeton Memory. West. 

Williams, Jesse Lynch Williams, Mr. Cleve- 
land, A Personal Impression. Williams. 

1. Henry Watterson, "Marse Henry," an Autobiography, vol. 

ii, p. 118. 

2. Writings, p. 338. 

3. Parker, p. 391. 

4. Black, p. 43. 

5. Fishing Sketches, p. 45. 

6. Gilder, p. 171. 

7. West, p. 328. 

8. West, p. 326. 

9. Black, p. 63. 

10. Parker, p. 382. 

11. Gilder, p. 48. 

12. Gilder, p. 249. 

13. Williams, pp. 24, 25. 

14. West, p. 336. 

15. Fishing Sketches, p. 53. 

16. James Russell Lowell, Letters, vol. n, p. 326. 

17. Gilder, p. 192. 

18. Parker, p. 377. 

19. Williams, p. 61. 

20. Speech to Grover Cleveland Association in New York, 

March 18, 1919, in Boston Transcript, March 19, 
1919. 

21. Fishing Sketches, p. 13. 

22. James Shirley, The Bird in a Cage, act iv, scene 1. 

23. For this story I am indebted to my wife, who observed 

the incident. 

24. Gilder, p. 47. 

236 



NOTES 

25. Frederick E. Goodrich, The Life and Public Services of 

G rover Cleveland, p. 74. 

26. Ibid. 

27. Gilder, p. 259. 

28. Writings, p. 534. 

29. Leonard Wood, in Speech to Grover Cleveland Associa- 

tion in New York, March 18, 1919, in Boston Tran- 
script, March 19, 1919. 

30. Williams, p. 11. 

31. Writings, p. 212. 

32. James D. Richardson, Messages and Papers of the Presi- 

dents, vol. vm, p. 450. c 

33. Fishing Sketches, p. 28. 

34. Fishing Sketches, p. 30. 

35. Gilder, p. 36. 

36. Williams, p. 31. 

37. Gilder, p. 30. 

38. Fishing Sketches, p. 106. 

39. Gilder, p. 49. 

40. James Russell Lowell, Letters, vol. n, p. 344. 

41. Black, p. 61. 

42. Gilder, p. 169. 

43. Parker, p. 35. 

44. Parker, p. 341. 

45. Writings, p. 264. 

46. Parker, p. 210. 

47. Parker, p. 335. 

48. Messages from the Governors of the State of New York, ed- 

ited by Charles Z. Lincoln, vol. vn, p. 873. 

49. Gilder, p. 30. 

50. See Life of General E. S. Bragg, supposedly supplied by 

himself, in Who 's*Who in America for 1902. 

51. Henry Watterson, "Marse Henry" an Autobiography, vol. 

ii, p. 144. 

52. Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, p. 320. 

53. To E. P. Wheeler, printed in Sixty Years of American 

Life, by Everett P. Wheeler, p. 250. 

54. For the history of this expression as finally shaped by 

Colonel Lamont see Parker, pp. 43, 44. 

55. Gail Hamilton, Biography of James G. Blaine, p. 515. 

237 



AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

56. Writings, p. 86. 

57. Fishing Sketches, p. 87. 

58. Parker, p. 349. 

59. Parker, p. 105. 

60. James D. Richardson, Messages and Papers of the Pres- 

idents, vol. viii, p. iv. 

61. Gilder, p. 191. 

62. West, p. 336. 

63. Gilder, p. 190. 

64. Gilder, p. 179. 

65. Gilder, p. 270. 

VII: HENRY JAMES 

James, Henry, Letters, Selected and edited by 

Percy Lubbock, two volumes. Letters. 

James, Henry, The Novels and Tales of Henry 
James, Charles Scribner's Sons, twenty-six 
volumes. (This edition, with prefaces and 
extensive revision by the author, does not 
comprise all of James's works, but is quoted 
for all writings contained in it.) Works. 

James, Henry, Notes of a Son and Brother, Son and Brother. 

James, Henry, A Small Boy and Others. Small Boy. 

1. Letters, vol. i, p. 165. 

2. Henry James, The Art of Fiction (printed with an essay 

by Walter Besant on the same subject), p. 66. Also in 
Partial Portraits, by Henry James, p. 390. 

3. Letters, vol. n, p. 489. 

4. Works, vol. xxiv, p. 349. 

5. Works, vol. xxi, p. xxi. 

6. Works, vol. xn, p. ix. 

7. Small Boy, p. 263. 

8. Works, vol. v, p. viii. 

9. Irish Essays (edition 1882), p. v. 

10. Letters, vol. n, p. 347. 

11. Works, vol. ix, p. v. f 

12. Letters, vol. i, p. 289. 

13. Letters, vol. n, p. 490. 

14. Works, vol. ix, p. 303. 

238 



NOTES 

15. Works, vol. xvm, p. 422. 

16. Letters, vol. n, p. 119. 
-iTT Works, vol. xxi, p. v. 

18. Letters, vol. n, p. 323. 

19. Letters, vol. n, p. 9. 

20. William James, Letters, vol. i, p. 41. 

21. Letters, vol. n, p. 11. 

22. Theodora Bosanquet, in Yale Review, vol. x, p. 156. 

23. Letters, vol. i, p. 310. 

24. Letters, vol. i, p. 309. 

25. Letters, vol. I, p. 101. 

26. Letters, vol. i, p. 115. 

27. Letters, vol. i, p. 337. 

28. Henry James, French Poets and Novelists (English edition, 

1878), p. 109. 

29. Ibid. 

30. Henrv James, The American Scene (American edition, 

1907), p. 367. 

31. Henry James, French Poets and Novelists, p. 175. 

32. Letters, vol. i, p. 379. 

33. Lawrence Pearsall Jacks, Life and Letters of Stopford 

Brooke, vol. n, p. 672. 

34. Letters, vol. i, p. 348. A correspondent writes me that 

James's brother Wilkie, commenting upon Henry's im- 
perfect knowledge of women, declared that he " had never 
been in love, and lacked the insight which that experience 
gave to a man." Such a general negative as this is some- 
what difficult to accept, but it is exceedingly suggestive. 

35. Son and Brother, p. 324. 

36. Letters, vol. i, p. 183. 

37. Letters, vol. n, p. 104. 

38. Works, vol. xv, p. 22. 

39. Works, vol. v, p. xxi. 

40. Letters, vol. i, p. 198. 

41. Letters, vol. n, p. 102. 

42. Letters, vol. i, p. 68. 

43. Works, vol. ix, p. xxiii. 

44. Letters, vol. i, p. 103. 

45. Works, vol. x, p. x. 

46. Letters, vol. i, p. 409. 

239 



AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

47. Works, vol. x, p. xi. 

48. Letters, vol. I, p. 180. 

49. Letters, vol. I, p. 173. 

50. Letters, vol. i, p. 182. 

51. Henry James, French Poets and Novelists, p. 400. 

52. Letters, vol. n, p. 485. 

VIII: JOSEPH JEFFERSON 

Jefferson, Eugenie Paul, Intimate Recollections 
of Joseph Jefferson. Mrs. Jefferson. 

Jefferson, Joseph, The Autobiography of Joseph 
Jefferson. Autobiography. 

Wilson, Francis, Joseph Jefferson. Wilson. 

Winter, William, Life and Art of Joseph Jeffer- 
son. Winter, Life. 

Winter, William, Other Days. Other Days. 

1. Winter, Life, p. 136. 

2. Autobiography, p. 115. 

3. Winter, Life, p. 15. 

4. Other Days, p. 88. 

5. Mrs. Jefferson, p. 204. 

6. Henry Watterson, "Marse Henry," An Autobiography, 

vol. ii, p. 183. 

7. Winter, Life, p. 168. 

8. William Winter, Life and Art of Edwin Booth (edition, 

1894), p. 107. 

9. Mary Shaw, in Century, vol. lxxxiii, p. 736. 

10. Wilson, p. 330. 

11. Autobiography, p. 439. 

12. Wilson, p. 28. 

13. Autobiography, p. 23. 

14. Autobiography, p. 101. 

15. Autobiography, p. 303. 

16. Other Days, p. 81. 

17. Autobiography, p. 118. 

18. Autobiography, p. 101. 

19. Autobiography, p. 340. 

20. Mary Shaw, in Century, vol. lxxxiii, p. 731. 

240 



NOTES 

21. Henry Watterson,' "Marse Henry," An Autobiography, 

vol. ii, p. 185. 

22. Mary Shaw, in Century, vol. lxxxv, p. 382. 

23. Mary Shaw, in Century, vol. lxxxiii, p. 732. 

24. Autobiography, p. 402. 

25. Winter, Life, p. 195. 

26. Other Days, p. 86. 

27. Mary Shaw, in Century, vol. lxxxiii, p. 735. 

28. Autobiography, p. 222. 

29. Wilson, p. 172. 

30. Autobiography, p. 132. 

31. Autobiography, p. 303. 

32. Wilson, p. 128. 

33. Autobiography, p. 115. 

34. Wilson, p. 11. 

35. Wilson, p. 8. 

36. Mary Shaw, in Century, vol. lxxxiii, p. 736. 

37. Rip Van Winkle as Played by Joseph Jefferson, p. 171. 

38. Wilson, p. 68. 

39. Autobiography, p. 158. 

40. Mrs. Jefferson, p. 169. From an interview reported in the 

New York Herald. 

41. Ibid. 

42. Autobiography, pp. 224-229 and 302-310. 

43. Other Days, p. 75. 

44. Wilson, p. 25. 

45. Autobiography, p. 116. 

46. Autobiography, p. 81. 

47. Henry Watterson, "Marse Henry," An Autobiography t 

vol. ii, p. 173. 

48. Wilson, p. 59. 

49. Mrs. Jefferson, p. 66. 

50. Mrs. Jefferson, p. 70. 

51. Mary Shaw, in Century, vol. lxxxiii, p. 735. 

52. Wilson, p. 66. 

53. Autobiography, p. 348. 

54. Wilson, p. 84. 

55. Wilson, p. 307, slightly abbreviated. 

56. Eugenie Paul Jefferson, in Outing, vol. Lin, p. 739. 

57. Wilson, p. 306. 

241 



AMERICAN PORTRAITS 

58. Ibid. 

59. Other Days, p. 86. 

60. Other Days, p. 87. 

61. Wilson, epigraph of book. 

62. Autobiography, p. 216. 

63. Mrs. Jefferson, p. 216. 

64. Richard Watson Gilder, Letters, p. 162. 

65. Wilson, p. 214. 

66. Other Days, p. 78. 

67. Other Days, p. 86. 

68. Other Days, p. 78. 

69. Mary Shaw, in Century, vol. lxxxv, p. 381, 

70. Mrs. Jefferson, p. 211. 

71. Autobiography, p. 381. 

72. Wilson, p. 341. 

73. Wilson, p. 13. 

74. Wilson, p. 244. 

75. Wilson, p. 321. 

76. Autobiography, p. 474. 



INDEX 



INDEX 



Adams, Henry, 69, 71, 112, 154; 
Chronology, 30; never educated, 
31, 32; his idea of the object of ed- 
ucation, 31; his definition of a 
teacher, 32, 33; a student at Har- 
vard, 33; in Germany, 34, 35; a 
teacher at Harvard, 35, 36; his 
salon in Washington, 37; his gen- 
eral human relations, 37, 38; fared 
better with women than with men, 
38, 39; his friendships, 39, 40; his 
marriage, 40; in London during 
the Civil War, 41, 42; his political 
experience in America, 42, 43; a 
true conservative, 42, 44; his view 
of the workings of American gov- 
ernment, 43; traveled extensively, 
43~45'» gained little from art, 45, 
46, 53; Mont-Saint- Michel and 
Chartres, 46; his interest in Dar- 
winism, 47, 48, 50; lacked lucidity, 
48-50; his theory of acceleration, 
49; a Darwinian for fun, 50; as an 
author, 51, 53; lacked seriousness, 
51; had little enthusiasm, 52, 53; 
his attitude toward religion, 54; 
inherited too much egotism, 54, 
55; mistrusted simplicity, 56; 
needed to be de-educated, 56; on 
Presidents Harrison and Cleve- 
land, 164. 

Aldrich, Nelson W., 120. 

Arnold, Matthew, 177. 

Bacher, Otto H., on Whistler, 93. 

Balzac, Honore, 176, 185. 

Barker, Dr., 119. 

Birrell, Augustine, on Mark Twain, 
23, 24. 

Blaine, Emmons, 120. 

Blaine, James Gillespie, 167; Chro- 
nology, 114; as seen by his wife, 



115, 116, 1 19-21; his whole life 
political, 116; intensely active 
intellectually, 116, 117; a master 
of words, 117, 135; his religion, 
118; cared little for art, 118, 119; 
his sensibility profound, 119; mor- 
bid about his health, 119, 120; 
devoted to his wife and children, 
121-23; his social qualities, 123, 
124; a consummate politician, 
124, 128; his personal charm, 125; 
his remarkable memory, 126, 127; 
a magnetic man, 127; a natural 
leader, 127, 128; his statesman- 
ship, 128-30; his financial career, 
130-38; congressional investiga- 
tion, 134, 135; his fundamental 
error, 137; his ambition for the 
presidency, 138-40. 

Blaine, Mrs. J. G., her letters quoted, 
115, 116, 117, 118, 120, 121, 123, 
128, 130, 131, 140. 

Bosanquet, Miss, Henry James's sec- 
retary, 183, 184. 

Boston, solved the universe, 33. 

Boucicault, Dion, 211. 

Bourget, Paul, 179. 

Bragg, Gen. E. S., 164. 

Browning, Robert, 179. 

Burchard, Rev. Samuel D., 139. 

Burlingame, Anson, 127. 

Burton, Lady, and Whistler, 90. 

Calderon, Pedro, 223. 

Carlisle, John G., 170. 

Cellini, Benvenuto, Whistler com- 
pared to, 94. 

Chesterfield, Lord, 126. 

Chesterton, G. K., on Whistler, 94, 
97, 101. 

Cibber, Colley, a saying of Dr. John- 
son about, 99. 



245 



INDEX 



Clemens, Samuel Langhorne, see 
Twain, Mark. 

Cleveland, Stephen Grover, Chro- 
nology, 144; his early life, 145, 148, 
150; earnestly devoted to his task, 
146 ; nominated for the presidency, 
147; lacking in cultivation, 148; 
his manner of writing, 149; his 
spiritual and religious attitude, 
150, 151, 169; indifferent to art, 
151; an ardent fisherman and 
hunter, 152, 153; loved children, 
I 53» J 54; Fishing and Shooting 
Sketches, quoted. 154, 158; simple 
and frugal, 154, 155; very gener- 
ous, 155; his friendship and per- 
sonal affection, 156, 157; his hu- 
mor, 157, 158, 160; unpopular, 
159; had great public merits, 160; 
thoroughly democratic, 160, 161; 
his speeches, 161; had superb 
physical strength, 162; an intense 
party man, 162, 163; his enemies, 
164; what he stands for in Ameri- 
can history, 165-70; essentially a 
conservative, 166; his Presidential 
Problems, 167; the strong features 
of his character, 167, 168; his use 
of the veto power, 168, 169; his 
passionate Americanism, 169, 170; 
on Joseph Jefferson, 200 ; friendship 
with Jefferson, 213, 215, 217, 219. 

Cleveland, Mrs. Grover, 115, 155, 
217, 218. 

Committee of One Hundred, on 
Blaine, 136. 

Corot, Jean Baptiste, 215. 

Cowper, William, quoted, in. 

Delane, John T. t and Henry Adams, 
41, 42. 

Democratic party, principles of, 166. 

Dickinson, Emily, 222. 

Dream, the element of, in Mark 
Twain, 7, 9-1 1, 13; in Joseph Jef- 
ferson, 222; in Emily Dickinson, 
222. 

Du Maurier, George, 97. 



Eden, Sir William, and Whistler, 

95, 98. 

Elkins, Stephen B., 140. 

Farnsworth, General, 147. 

Field, Eugene, and Joseph Jefferson, 

221. 
Finn, Huck, 15, 16. 
Fisher, Warren, Jr., and J. G. Blaine, 

132-34, 138, 139. 
Fitzgerald, Edward, quoted, 223. 
Flaubert, Gustave, 78, 81. 
Fletcher, Phineas, quoted, 78. 
Franklin, Benjamin, 20. 
Friends, born, not made, 39. 

Garfield, President James A., 167; 

Blaine's eulogy on, 117, 119. 
Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 56. 
Gautier, Theophile, 112. 
Gay, Walter, on Whistler at work, 

103. 
Gentle Art of Making Enemies, The, 

96, 99, 100. 

German teaching, Henry Adams's 
opinion of, 35. 

Gilder, Richard Watson, 156, 217. 

God, Mark Twain's idea of, 25, 26; 
his place in the education of 
Henry Adams, 54; Whistler's feel- 
ing about, 90. 

Gray, Thomas, on money, 63, 64. 

Haden, Sir Seymour, 95, 96. 
Harrison, President Benjamin, 164. 
Harvard College, "a good school," 

33; education at, 36, 38. 
Hay, John, and Henry Adams, 39; 

on Blaine, 125. 
Heine, Heinrich, 95. 
Hiscock, Frank, 120. 
History of the United States, Henry 

Adams's, 51. 
Hoar, Senator George F. f on Blaine, 

117, 124, 128, 130, 137. 
Howells, William Dean, 182; on 

Mark Twain, 14. 
Huysmans, J. K., on Whistler, 108. 



246 



INDEX 



Ingersoll, Robert G., 17. 
Innocents Abroad, The, 3. 

James, Henry, Chronology, 172; 
sincere in life and art, 173, 187; a 
tireless observer, 174; cared more 
for expression than for the thing 
expressed, 174, 175; puzzled by 
America, 176, 177; indifferent to 
fact, 177, 178; strains and forces 
words, 179, 180; had little life 
apart from his art, 181-84, 189; 
his spiritual attitude, 184, 185; 
his conversation, 186, 187; his 
strong human affection, 187-89; 
passionately interested in the 
Great War, 189; his real existence, 
in his art, 189-92; not a popular 
novelist, 192, 194; as a dramatist, 
192-94; not embittered by neglect 
or criticism, 194, 195; generous 
toward his fellow-writers, 195, 
196. 

James, William, 182. 

Jefferson, Joseph, 156; Chronology, 
198; came of a theatrical family, 
199; kept his own nature high and 
pure, 200, 201 ; a friend of Grover 
Cleveland, 200, 213, 215, 217, 
219; had definite views about his 
art, 201 ; gave careful attention to 
the audience, 201, 202; had keen 
sensibilities, 202; a good finan- 
cier, 203, 216; enjoyed practical 
jokes, 203, 204; his relations with 
fellow-actors, 203-06; accused of 
wanting all the stage, 206; had 
an immense ambition, 207; knew 
both failure and success, 208; his 
triumph, 209-1 1 ; Rip Van Winkle, 
2 1 1 ; his A utobiography, 2 1 2 ; his ac- 
quaintance with books, 213; fond 
of sport, 213; an ardent painter, 
214, 215; wisely generous, 216; 
an admirable story-teller, 216; his 
family life, 217; devoted to his 
friends, 217; his religious attitude, 
218-20; knew the secret of life, 



220; loved dolls, 221; was a child 
of dream, 222. 
Johnson, Dr. Samuel, on Colley 
Cibber, 99; on flattery, 209. 

Keats, John, 78, 80, 112. 

Keppel, Frederick, and WTiistler 

92. 
King, Clarence, and Henry Adams, 

39- 

La Farge, Mrs. Mabel, 40. 
Lamb, Charles, 158. 
Lamont, Col. Daniel S., 147. 
Lang, Andrew, and Mark Twain, 

21, 22. 

Lanier, Sidney, 112; Chronology, 60; 
lived in a spiritual whirlwind, 61; 
his military experiences, 61, 62; a 
tuberculous invalid, 62, 63; im- 
poverished by the war, 63, 64; his 
love of poetry and music, 64, 65, 
7 2 > 75> 76; craved recognition, 66, 
67, 77; full of ardor, 68, 69; his 
critical writings, 69, 70; his hours 
of peace, 71, 72; loved a good 
horse, 73; loved the repose of Na- 
ture, 73; his humor, 74; could not 
stay angry, 75; his affection for 
his wife and children, 76, 77; his 
ambition, 77, 78 ; burned to make 
others feel what he felt, 79; the 
results of his struggle, 80, 81 ; al- 
ways a Southerner, 80, 81; his 
poems, 81-83. 

Lee, Robert E., 27, 154. 

Leopardi, Giacomo, 16. 

Letter to Teachers of American His- 
tory, A, by Henry Adams, 48. 

Lincoln, Abraham, 20, 154, 170. 

Little Rock and Fort Smith Rail- 
road, the, 132, 133. 

Lodge, Henry Cabot, 39; on Henry 
Adams, 36. 

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, lov- 
able and beloved, 100. 

Lowell, James Russell, quoted, 137, 
153, 160. 



247 



INDEX 



Lucretius, Lanier compared to, 69, 

70, 81, 82. 
Lyon, Mary, 56, 57. 

Macbeth, Lady, 116. 

McKinley, President William, 157, 
164. 

Matthews, Charles J., 206. 

Menpes, Mortimer, on Whistler, 89, 
93, 94, 101, 103. 

Meux, Lady, and Whistler, 98. 

Milnes, Richard Monckton, and 
Henry Adams, 41. 

Milton, John, 94; on fame, 78. 

Mont-Saint- Michel and Chartres, by 
Henry Adams, 46, 49, 54. 

Moore, George, 95, 96. 

More, Hannah, 209. 

Mulligan, James, 134. 

Music, the art of struggle, 72; de- 
pends on human emotion, 107, 
no. 

Nye, "Bill," 218. 

Old Times on the Mississippi, 3. 

Raphael, his friendly courtesy, 100. 
Republican party, principles of, 166. 
Rhodes, James Ford, 137. 
Richardson, James D., 168. 
Rip Van Winkle, 207, 210, 211. 
Root, Elihu, on Blaine, 129. 
Roughing It, 3. 

Saint Ives, 95. 

Schumann, Robert, Lanier's criti- 
cism of, 68, 69. 

Seneca, quoted, 223. 

Seward, William H., 126, 129, 162. 

Shakespeare, William, his clowns, 
221, 222. 

Shaw, Mary, and Joseph Jefferson, 
202, 207, 209, 219. 

Sherman, Gen. W. T., on Blaine, 
129. 

Speculation, two times when a man 
should not venture on, 7. 



Stan wood, Edward, 139. 
Stevenson, Robert Louis, 22. 
Sumner, Charles, 34. 
Swift, Jonathan, 97. 

Teacher, Henry Adams's definition 
of a, 32, 33; affects eternity, 36. 

Ten O'Clock, Whistler's, 90, 91. 

Thought, carnivorous, 69. 

Tilden, Samuel J., 162. 

Trollope, Anthony, 176. 

Twain, Mark, 69, 112, 222; Chronol- 
ogy, 2; not to be judged by or- 
dinary standards, 3; his way of 
working, 4; liked literary glory, 4, 
10; something of the bard about 
him, 4; essentially a journalist, 5; 
his early days, 5-7; walked the 
city roofs with Artemus Ward, 6; 
his energy, 6; followed his fancies, 
6; wanted money for what it 
brings, 7, 9 ; loved to take a chance, 
7, 9; a dreamer, 7, 9, 10, 13; never 
settled down, 7; had perfect 
health, 8; made friends of all sorts 
and conditions of men, 8; his love 
and tenderness, 8, 15, 21; never a 
good calculator, 9; tragedy and 
disaster, 10, n; generally known 
as a laugher, 11,12; was he a great 
humorist, 12, 13, 19; as a thinker, 
13, 14, 16-18; his confessions, 15, 
20; scrupulous in financial rela- 
tions, 15; had a trained Presby- 
terian conscience, 15; trusted 
men, 16; lacked great spiritual 
resources, 18; thoroughly Ameri- 
can, 19-21; his appearance, 20; 
democratic, 21, 22 ; his best-known 
books, 22; his influence on the 
masses, 23, 24; an overthrower of 
shams, 23, 24; compared to Vol- 
taire, 24, 27; called a demolisher 
of reverence, 24-26; his idea of 
God, 25, 26; charged with evil 
influence, 26, 27; taken seriously, 
he is desolating, 27, 28; his visit to 
Whistler, 98. 



248 



INDEX 



Twenty Years in Congress, 117. 

Van Dyke, John C, on Whistler, 

100, 104. 
Vasari, Giorgio, 94, 100. 
Voltaire, Francois, 97; Mark Twain 

compared to, 24, 27. 

Wagner, Richard, 218. 

Ward, Artemus, and Mark Twain, 6. 

Watterson, Col. Henry, 164; on 
Joseph Jefferson, 200, 213. 

Wells, H. G., 196. 

West, Andrew F., 152. 

Whistler, James McNeill, 204; Chro- 
nology, 86; a snarled soul, 87; 
anecdotes of, 87, 90, 92, 93, 94, 
96, 98, 103, 104; his birth, 88; 
drawing and painting his only 
serious business, 88; apparently 
read little, 89; his attitude toward 
religion, 90; his theories about art, 
90, 91; knew privation, 91, 92; 
the centre of his own universe, 
92, 93; his childlikeness, 92-95, 
100, 106; his white lock, 93, 94; 
liked flattery and resented criti- 



cism, 95 ; The Gentle A rt of Making 
Enemies, 96, 99, 100; an undig- 
nified writer, 96, 97; liked fighting, 

97, 98; his revenge on Sir William 
Eden, 98, 99; the Peacock Room, 

98, 107; contrasted with Longfel- 
low and Raphael, 100; did not 
like to be alone, 101 ; his mother 
and his wife, 102, 103; his art, 
103-10; his feeling about money, 
104; could profit by intelligent 
criticism, 104; a hard worker, 
105; his instinct of truth, 106; 
reveled in decorative richness, 
107; his sense of mystery, 108, 
in, 112; influenced by Russia, 
109; did not appreciate nature, 
no. 

White, Andrew D., on Blaine, 124. 

Wilde, Oscar, and Whistler, 95, 97. 

Wilson, Francis, and Joseph Jeffer- 
son, 209, 212, 220, 221. 

Winter, William, on Joseph Jeffer- 
son, 206, 207, 213, 214, 218, 219. 

Woman, the proper study of man- 
kind, 38. 

Wood, Gen. Leonard, 154. 



